| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Michael A. Gomez. Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1998. Pp. xi, 370. Cloth $45.00, paper $18.95.

Michael A. Gomez presents a persuasive argument that African ethnicities had both a profound effect and an enduring presence within the slave communities of the southern United States. His work thus not only supports but also advances significantly a dominant trend in recent slavery historiography emphasizing the agency of enslaved African Americans in shaping their world. 1

Race, a convenient construction imposed by whites to categorize African Americans but "without significant meaning in much of Africa" (p. 11) before the Atlantic slave trade, did not quickly overwhelm ethnicity as the key determinant of slave identity, as generations of commentators and scholars have posited. Slaves' African antecedents retained potency and vitality at least through 1830, when Gomez concludes his study, by which time American-born slaves predominated and a composite African-American identity had become more readily discernible. . . .

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