Biography and the Black Atlantic ed. by Lisa A. Lindsay and John Wood Sweet (review)

Joseph Miller’s essay, “A Historical Approach of the Biographical Turn,” is the opener for 12 essays focusing on black biographies of the transatlantic world. Miller contends that the study of biography will open for historians a new pathway to greater understanding of the people and experiences of Black Atlantic societies. Studying black biographies can take us beyond the limitations of sociologist Orlando Patterson’s theory of the social death of the enslaved—a direction that Miller maintains has brought us to a narrow account that is fundamentally “an ideological construction of the masters.” Turning to biography and the African perspective of time and history as additive, Miller proposes that we can instead understand enslavement as part of a complex accumulation of lived experience, that is, “another layer of life, not the totalizing experience that modern sociology makes of ‘social death.’”

The collection provides for a synergy of methodological description and biographical narrative, and is laid out in four sections: Parameters, Mobility, Self-Fashioning, and Politics. Several memorable chapters take us to biographies of lesser-known figures and offer nuanced critiques that invite us to consider the complex historical perspectives revealed in these individual histories. In the Mobility section, this is illustrated in Cassandra Pybus’s “Recovered Lives as a Window into the Enslaved Family” (chapter five) and João José Reis’s “From Slave to Wealthy African Freedman: The Story of Manoel Joaquim Ricardo” (chapter xix). Pybus begins with a look at The Book of Negroes, “a meticulous list drawn up between May and November 1783, in which the British recorded the personal details of some 3,000 African Americans evacuated to Nova Scotia and elsewhere.” From this source she recreates the history of Jane Thompson and her circle of family relations, who defected to the British side during the Revolutionary War. Tracing Thompson’s story, Pybus unearths a vibrant narrative of a family and community consisting of enslaved, free, and those in between. A narrative of mobility, it illustrates the geographical expanses covered in Atlantic slaving. In Jane Thompson, we see a network of people of African descent whose fates and travels extended across the Caribbean, the United States, Nova Scotia, and Sierra Leone.

Reis looks at social mobility and its restrictions through the story of an Afro Brazilian whose emancipation and financial achievement illustrates the opportunity seized by Africans enslaved in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Brazil. Reis not only calls attention to freed slaves who became slave owners, but also to those enslaved who were themselves slave owners. Ultimately, Reis reminds us that no level of economic success could offer the same opportunities for Afro Brazilians to assimilate into the “local, free society” as it would for their Portuguese peers.

In “David Dorr’s Journey toward Selfhood in Europe” (chapter seven), Lloyd S. Kramer opens the focus on biography as self-fashioning. Through his analysis of Dorr’s travel accounts, he shows us how the travel narrative can serve as a biographical framework for interpreting transnational experience and identity formation. Although the fourth section focuses on politics, the essays found there also take on the topic of self-fashioning, as they reveal experiences of blacks on both side of the Atlantic in shaping and reshaping their identities and political alliances. In chapter ten, “The Atlantic Transformations of Francisco Menéndez,” Jane Landers recounts the life of an eighteenth-century black leader, a Mandinga and a former slave, whose alliances with Native Americans and the Spanish government in Florida led to his becoming the leader of the “first free black town in what is today the United States.” His story begins with his origins in Gambia, but he ended up in Florida, after escaping slavery in South Carolina. His part in the US-Spanish conflict led him to the Caribbean. Menéndez’s story further reminds us that there is a history...