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Book Review
Comparative/World
| Linda M. Heywood. Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2002. Pp. xv, 384. Cloth $65.00, paper $23.00.
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| This is an exemplary collection of essays, presenting new information and interpretations that fundamentally revise and deepen our understanding of the slave trade and the African diaspora. Spanning Europe, Africa, and the Americas, it also illustrates how a global perspective can help to reconceptualize phenomena that are often examined in more geographically bounded ways. |
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Although world history has burgeoned as a discipline in recent decades, it has tended to emphasize large-scale trends and connections. Finely textured social and cultural histories, for obvious reasons, generally have a much more restricted geographical scope. Yet the disconnect between African history and American (U.S. and Latin American) histories is particularly troubling. Studies of the African diaspora too frequently can only make vague assumptions and references to the African side of the history. This volume contributes to remedying both the disconnect among regional histories and the paucity of social-cultural texture in world histories. |
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The anthology is divided into sections focusing on Central Africa, Brazil, Haiti and Spanish America, and North America and the Caribbean. The essays focus on several interrelated themes. Central Africans, the contributors argue, comprised a far larger portion of those enslaved and transported than has previously been acknowledged. In certain areas—Brazil, Haiti, and the South Carolina-Georgia Low Country—Central Africans outnumbered West Africans. Central Africans came from several different polities but shared a Bantu linguistic heritage and a common cultural background. In addition, Central Africa had been subject to Portuguese missionary and colonial presence since the end of the fifteenth century. Thus Central Africans brought with them to the Americas a pre-existing creole (Afro-Lusitanian) culture and a native Central African Catholicism. |
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Linda M. Heywood's introduction traces the historiography of African diaspora studies, pointing out that early twentieth-century studies focused on particular regions, assumed that most slaves were of West African (Yoruba and Dahomey) origin, and emphasized diasporic African culture with little attention to African history. The second generation of diaspora studies, from the 1960s to the 1990s, took a more global approach, emphasizing the economics and demographics of the slave trade and downplaying cultural issues. In the last decade, a third wave—in which Heywood implicitly places this volume—has begun to use the concept of a "South Atlantic system" to look at the conjoined histories of Africa and the Americas and to explore "the role of Africans in the formation and transformation of Atlantic culture" (p. 7). |
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The contributers to the volume include Africanists (T. J. Desch-Obi, Heywood, Wyatt MacGaffey, Joseph Miller, Hein Vanhee), Latin Americanists (Mary C. Karasch, Elizabeth W. Kiddy, Jane Landers, Robert W. Slenes), a Caribbeanist (Monica Schuler), and several scholars whose training and central work cross borders and who might identify African diaspora studies or world history as their primary field (Ras Michael Brown, Terry Rey, John K. Thornton; Desch-Obi and Heywood could also fit into this category). |
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