Reviewed by Jeffrey A. Fortin | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, LXV.4

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Reviewed by Jeffrey A. Fortin | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, LXV.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Becoming African in America: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic. By James Sidbury. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. 303 pages. $29.95 (cloth).
Reviewed by Jeffrey A. Fortin, State University of New York College at Oneonta
Africans captured in the Atlantic slave trade were often thrown together with persons from other ethnic or cultural backgrounds partly in an effort to stem shipboard revolts. Collusion seemed less likely between people who did not speak each other's languages or share cultural ties. On land, slave traders and slave owners used a variety of methods to strip Africans of their cultural heritage and to maintain more effective control over those in bondage. The results of such efforts were mixed. Linda M. Heywood, John Thornton, and others have demonstrated the extent of African cultural persistence, proving that even in the face of traumatic experiences in the Atlantic slave trade, ties to Africa remained, as cultural traditions proved fluid, uniting, and indefatigable. Fueled by the rapid growth of Atlantic history, scholarship on the African diaspora and slavery often focuses on the preservation of African culture among black communities in the Atlantic. Yet James Sidbury's Becoming African in America challenges us to think about African identity from a different perspective. Beginning with African Americans living and writing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Sidbury explores how free blacks—many of whom were born in America—rediscovered an "Africanness" (6) that was unavailable to previous generations of Africans in America. Joining Michael A. Gomez's search for the origins of African American racial consciousness, Becoming African in America is a fine example of cultural history in the hands of a skilled historian: a richly detailed study that conveys the complexity of identity formation and cultural development.¹	1
Sidbury's latest project seeks to uncover the meaning behind free blacks' appropriation of the term "African," transforming a word with negative connotations into a hopeful term representing ties among millions of Africans in the diaspora. Since the mid-seventeenth century, words such as "Africa" and "African" filled Europeans' minds with visions of savagery and a people they deemed uncivilized. Sidbury argues that, by the late eighteenth century, Phillis Wheatley, Ignatius Sancho, Olaudah Equiano, and others created an "alternative understanding of 'Africanness' that could provide a source of pride and unity for the diverse victims of the Atlantic slave trade" (6). Based on "emerging European perceptions that residents of Africa shared a 'racial' essence" (7), this alternative identity presented Africans as integral to the "Enlightenment's grand narrative of human history" (7). Black intellectuals, writers, and activists accomplished this complicated task by simultaneously expressing their African identity and adopting key European cultural values such as Christianity.	2
Becoming African in America is a sophisticated examination of the formative period of the Black Atlantic. Sidbury firmly roots his argument in the Black Atlantic because the shared disruptive experiences of the slave trade made unity between the culturally and ethnically diverse African peoples in the diaspora possible. The talented and well-traveled Wheatley, members of Newport's African Union Society, and the self-made and moderately wealthy sea captain Paul Cuffe, to name a few of the historical actors who appear in Sidbury's tale, were "self-styled 'Africans'" torn between their "allegiance" (15) to Africa and to America. According to Sidbury, being American and being African were not mutually exclusive in the minds of free blacks but were instead intimately connected. Africa was a memory to free blacks in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, no less real but clouded by their experiences on the western side of the Atlantic. Having absorbed Christian values and beliefs, the importance of free labor and trade, and the age of revolution's language of liberty, these new "Africans" set out to unite the various black communities in the Atlantic world. The resulting efforts of "racial uplift" (11)—showing the light of the Lord, for example, to non-Christian Africans—became integral to the construction of a unified Black Atlantic. Reconciling the tension between cultural memory and their diasporic experiences created what Sidbury calls a "profoundly ... 'American' story" (15). African Americans felt linked to their diasporic brethren, but they also believed it was their duty to spread Christianity to their fellow Africans.	. . .

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