Making Gullah: A History of Sapelo Islanders, Race, and the American Imagination by Melissa L. Cooper (review)

Melissa L. Cooper's Making Gullah: A History of Sapelo Islanders, Race, and the American Imaginationis an interdisciplinary study of cultural misrepresentation in America. The book is part of a vital revisionist historiography that usefully crosses subject matter and discipline. It should be read widely for its specific historical recovery and broader implications.

Making Gullahis a classic academic monograph in the best tradition. Though Cooper affirms her personal connection to the subject, the book is decidedly not a family history or a narrow ethnography. The name Gullahis of uncertain origins. Through much of the twentieth century, it was never a name that Sapelo Islanders used for themselves. Rather, it was originally a construct of white outsiders. Making Gullahis a case study of the making and remaking of race in America and an intellectual history of the centrality of cultural representation to racialization, past and present.

The book follows a standard layout. Each chapter explores a different era and mode of representation in the making and remaking of the Gullah people on this barrier island in coastal Georgia. The prologue, "The Misremembered Past," introduces the book's author, theme, and stakes. It includes a capsule overview of Sapelo Island's history and outlines the chapters, which run chronologically from the 1920s into the 2000s. The chapters following the prologue prioritize cultural analysis without sacrificing historical detail. Ultimately, Cooper is less interested in concluding who got Sapelo Island representation right or wrong than she is in the bigger "why" of it all. She "grapples with whyuncovering, collecting, and documenting black people's connections to Africa first became urgent, and whypreserving and reimagining these connections continues to fill an important need in American intellectual and cultural life" (p. 12).

As a model study in the workings of racial misrepresentation, Making Gullah's chief strength is its perspicacious synthesis spotlighting white and black cultural representation, scholarly and popular culture, journalism, and fiction. The book amasses a fine base of primary and secondary evidence. Cooper applies a firm historical methodology and theoretical framework informed by secondary sources in social, cultural, and intellectual history, Native American studies, travel writing, white and black folklore studies, anthropology, and black literary studies. She draws together a base of primary evidence that overlaps with her secondary sources and extends to archival collections, newspapers, periodicals, and oral history interviews conducted by the author.

Whether in the representation of the ivory tower or of popular culture, or in writing labeled fiction or nonfiction, what we find is that so many opportunities for real knowledge gathering were lost in the decades of Sapelo Island inquiry. In recent years, islanders have begun to reappropriate their heritage. Still, the collective image of the Gullah that was aggregated over decades weighs heavily. Cooper states that while "outsiders were preoccupied with uncovering Sapelo Islanders' African past" in a mythic imaginary, "Islanders were consumed with navigating complicated economic and racial terrain" in the real world (p. 150). At base, it too often added up to an ongoing denial of agency for people of color on Sapelo Island. Their contemporary efforts to exercise agency in reclaiming their land and identity continue the long fight for a future, which many have devoted themselves to all along, even if outsiders were not interested enough to ask.