U.S. Slavery and the Black Radical Tradition: The 25th Anniversary Edition of Sterling Stuckey’s Slave Culture

Over the past century, the study of slavery in the United States has moved from a place of near insignificance to one where it now plays a central role in defining and understanding nearly all aspects of U.S. life between the founding of the nation until the Civil War. Historians, for example, have recently argued that slavery not only determined one’s social status in the South, but filled Northern coffers and facilitated industrial capitalism, as well as pushing politicians—North, South, East, and West—to reconsider the “peculiar institution” and its implications for national advancement. Consequently this renewed interest in the scholarship on slavery has, by and large, compelled professional historians to place enslaved Africans center stage rather than stage left.¹

For these reasons, 2013 was an appropriate year for Oxford University Press to release the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Sterling Stuckey’s Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America, a pathbreaking synthesis and exploration of various dimensions of African slave culture in the United States from the perspective of the enslaved. When Stuckey’s book was first published in 1987, those who studied African American history and the history of black people in the diaspora recognized the book for what it was: a bold reframing of African American history that argued that African cultural retentions were of central importance to African people, whether enslaved or free. This view challenged entrenched scholars in both history and sociology who had long argued that slavery decimated the ties that bound people of African descent to Africa, and that European values and culture—especially Christianity—had obliterated traditional African retentions among those black Americans, North and South. This view, which depicted slavery as a totalizing institution and the enslaved as blank canvasses or objects of history, rather than subjects, posited that Africans in the United States knew only what their masters taught them, and thus viewed themselves and the world they inhabited through a European and white American lens.

For this reason alone, Stuckey’s Slave Culture was (and remains) a classic within the field, in that it showed how little historians understood about African and African American culture because they failed to seriously consider the influence of African survivals and syncretism or to fully interrogate the African origins of cultural practices and phenomenon they identified. Stuckey, in a lengthy and now famous introductory chapter, repeatedly documented numerous examples of “Africanity” within slave communities and irrefutably asserted the African presence in, and influence on, nascent African American communities. No longer is the question whether or not African people retained aspects of traditional African culture, but to what degree this culture shaped the worldview of the enslaved as well as the major ideological tenets of free black leaders outside the South.²

Despite Stuckey’s emphasis in his introduction on demonstrating the influence of Africanisms on the slave community, his analysis extends beyond the slave South in order to show how slave culture informed the perspectives and approaches of Black Nationalists throughout America—from the antebellum through Jim Crow eras. Consequently, Slave Culture operated outside of traditional North-South binaries, like Herbert Gutman’s The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, and moved across traditional temporal boundaries as well.³ Stuckey’s work continues to serve as a reminder to intellectuals who study African-descended people in the United States—regardless of period or subject matter—of the need to actively challenge and question conventional approaches and methods of historical inquiry when examining black life, culture, and thought. This sort of approach may continue to make some scholars reading the book today feel as uncomfortable as it made them when it was first published in 1987.⁴ Without any major reorganization of chapters, abridgement of the over 100-page introduction, or the addition of a concluding chapter, the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Slave Culture may be disquieting to scholars more used to examining slavery and the black protest tradition by region and time period.⁵ Yet, even if the...