Book Review

Canada and the United States

Alex Bontemps's book is principally concerned with the issue of African invisibility in the colonial South; that is, how Africans and their descendants, so vital to the U.S. South, were purposely confined to the margins of the society's self-projection and representation, and how some responded to their effacement. Nuanced and understated, Bontemps's study is a perspicacious meditation with insights easily missed (or misunderstood) if not carefully read.

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For Bontemps, the most nefarious aspect of North American slavery was the psychological toll it levied on Africans. More specifically, the survival of those enslaved required that they undergo an adjustment of the personality, an internalization of their invisibility, an absorption of their marginalization so thorough as to effect a subservience of attitude, yet preserve sufficient independence of self-assessment as to prevent the individual's total collapse in acquiescence. The maintenance of this dual perspective, different in character from W. E. B. Du Bois's discussion of "double consciousness" at the turn of the twentieth century, is the quintessential challenge for the enslaved, or what Bontemps refers to as "the dilemma."

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