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  • Africa and the Americas: Interconnections during the Slave Trade
  • Dale Tomich
Africa and the Americas: Interconnections during the Slave Trade. Edited by José C. Curto and Renée Soulodre-La France. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2005. Pp. vii, 338. Illustrations. Tables. Glossary. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $99.95 cloth; $29.95 paper.

This collection of essays seeks to contribute to the project of a non-Eurocentric Atlantic history by examining the interactive linkages between Africa and the Americas during the era of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The volume is presented as the logical conclusion to a series of conferences and an associated body of scholarship that has been delineating the conceptual ground and historical interconnections for such an approach. It regards the Atlantic as a unified unit of analysis, and, within comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives, it examines the impact of Africans and peoples of African descent, both slave and free, on diverse aspects of the societies of the Americas as well as the influence of the slave trade and integration into the Atlantic on Africa itself. The volume focuses primarily on the interconnections between western Africa and Brazil, but also includes Mozambique and Central Africa, Haiti and Spanish America. The inclusion of Mozambique and East Africa calls attention to the conception of the Atlantic as an historical rather than a geographical unit.

The book brings together a group of excellent essays by a distinguished group of international scholars including David Eltis, Stephen Behrendt, David Richardson, Edward Alpers, Luis Nicolau Parés, Elizabeth W. Kiddy, Dale Graden, João Reis, Jane Landers, Monica Schuler, Terry Rey, Elisée Soumonni, José Capela, and Colleen Krieger. Methodologically and theoretically sophisticated, the chapters present original research covering a wide range of topics and offer stimulating interpretations that provoke a re-thinking of the history of Atlantic slavery and the slave trade. Taken together, they indeed mark a new level of scholarship. One reason for their success is the degree to which they assimilate recent research on the Atlantic slave trade. Only the chapter by David Eltis, Stephen Behrendt, and David Richardson directly addresses the Atlantic slave trade. Nonetheless, the influence of The [End Page 498] Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (1999) that they compiled together with Herbert Klein is felt directly or indirectly throughout the book. It allows more specific identification than was previously possible of the sources, volume and destinations of the Atlantic slave trade and provides stimulus across disciplines and diverse areas of inquiry.

However, the advance represented by the collection under consideration is not simply the result of new and more precise data. The contributing authors demonstrate careful reflection and increased theoretical sophistication and methodological awareness in their work. The result is a shift in emphasis and a reformulation of the conceptual framework of Atlantic slavery. It contrasts with much recent scholarship of the African diaspora that also takes its impetus from new slave trade studies. This work has sought to emphasize African subjectivity and the continuity of African cultural forms in the New World. Such self-denominated revisionist approaches have tended to juxtapose the persistence of African identity and culture in the New World to creolization and the existence of African "retentions." In these conceptions, the latter terms are equated with cultural dilution if not loss. In contrast, the essays presented here resist imposing a binary African-creole distinction. Instead, they focus their attention on historical processes of social and cultural change in the Atlantic world.

Interestingly, this has entailed a reevaluation of Sidney Mintz and Richard Price's Birth of Afro-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (1976), frequently (mis)understood as an argument for creolization and the non-existence of African cultures in the New World. Grounded in a more developed historiography, the authors in this volume critique the abstract presuppositions of the "encounter model" within which Mintz and Price couched their arguments thirty years ago. However, they return to Mintz and Price's distinction between organizing institutions and structures of knowledge as opposed to particular behaviors and beliefs. Rather than focusing on explicit values, beliefs and behaviors, they fruitfully employ what Mintz and Price refer to as "grammars of culture" in...

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