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Acknowledgments This volume is an outgrowth of a 2005 international conference, “The African Diaspora to Latin America: New Directions,” sponsored by the Center for African American History at Northwestern University. The symposium communicated an effort to complicate our understanding of what is meant by “African American history ” and a desire to signal the center’s commitment to a more expansive vision of the early modern African Diaspora. The center’s inaugural director, Darlene Clark Hine, provided the vision and resources for the symposium. We owe a debt of gratitude to Darlene, her staff, the various units at Northwestern that cosponsored the event, and the conference participants and attendees. We would like to thank each of the contributors for making us stewards of their work, for prodding our thinking, and for offering suggestions along the way. Each of them engaged our queries, comments, and critiques with good humor, rigor, and patience. We thank the anonymous readers of the University of Illinois Press for their advice. A special thanks goes to Andre Devereux for his work on the glossary, bibliography , and administrative assistance. Kate Babbitt’s copyediting helped improve the book significantly. We also thank Joan Catapano for believing in the importance of this work. Portions of chapter 2 appeared as “‘To Marry in the Holy Mother Church’: Marriage and Community Formation,” in Frank T. Proctor III’s “Damned Notions of Liberty”: Slavery, Culture, and Power in Colonial Mexico, 1640–1769 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010): 37–67. We are grateful for permission to reuse the material. Finally, we would be remiss if we did not acknowledge the personal, intellectual, and institutional debts owed to friends, colleagues, and funding units at Northwestern University, the Center for Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins University, and the Humanities Center at the University of California, Irvine. ...

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