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  • Becoming African in America: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic
  • Paul E. Lovejoy
Becoming African in America: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic. By James Sidbury (New York, Oxford University Press, 2007) 291 pp. $29.95 cloth $19.95 paper

How people have perceived themselves as a community, and how identities are related to past allegiances and present circumstances, are essential questions in understanding the forms of resistance and accommodation that have shaped the Black Atlantic. Sidbury explores familiar territory as well as new terrain in examining these questions in the context of the Anglophone North Atlantic. By demonstrating the changing perspective of people of African descent in Britain and North America during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, he successfully grapples with an interpretation of African and African-American thought that puts historical flesh on the conceptual bones of Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic.”1

Sidbury’s focus is specifically the North Atlantic Anglophone world, with minor consideration of the Anglophone Caribbean or other influences of the broader Black Atlantic. This restricted view is exceedingly rewarding. Sidbury is able to establish that the struggle for cultural identity by people of African birth and African descent in the emergent United States hinged on their identification with Africa. In this astutely reasoned and carefully crafted study, he establishes that enslaved people of African origin who were on a quest for freedom in America suppressed [End Page 595] their dispersed origins to identify instead as “Africans,” as reflected in the writings of Africans in Britain and North America as early as the 1760s and 1770s. This evolving pride in African-ness was expressed in various institutional and literary forms throughout the decades of the American Revolution and the early years of the American Republic.

Despite this process of “becoming African in America,” the close affiliation with Africa rapidly dissipated as an intellectual and cultural factor among the free black population of the United States after 1820. Sidbury demonstrates that identity politics among free blacks hinged especially on perceptions of how identity related to abolition, resistance to slavery, and the protection of free status and equal opportunity. Although being African in America had become a source of pride by 1820, such sentiments were suddenly challenged with the rise of the American Colonization Society, which blacks perceived as a mechanism for the deportation of free blacks and former slaves, serving to tighten the reigns of slavery on relatives, friends, and others among the downtrodden enslaved population with which the free black population sympathized. To identify with Africa suddenly became a sign of betrayal to brethren still in cruel bondage. Becoming a resilient community in America now meant to identify as “colored,” not African.

Sidbury draws on a variety of sources, familiar and unfamiliar stories, and scholarly discourses to weave together his arguments about how the concept of “Africa” emerged and changed in North America. As the title suggests, he consciously plays with the concept of “Black Atlantic,” as advanced by Gilroy and critiqued by subsequent historians. Because he is concerned with self-perceptions of identity, Sidbury uses the classic texts—Cugoano, Wheatley, Equiano/Vassa, and Venture Smith—on both sides of the Anglophone North Atlantic.2 He then shows when and where “African” churches and “African” Masonic lodges were established, and how their racial segregation was cast in a nationalist and diasporic framework that ultimately extended to the colonies of former slaves in Sierra Leone and Liberia.

His study of Paul Cuffe is especially important in helping to establish the broad contours of a black Atlantic identity. Sidbury establishes how identity as “African” emerged at a specific period and in a clearly defined context that was associated with the fight against slavery and the slave trade, and that this phenomenon of diaspora identity crossed the Atlantic. By exploring the many leaders of the black community in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and elsewhere, Sidbury follows the inter-woven [End Page 596] odyssey of black survival and determination during the decades of the New Republic.

Sidbury argues that the minds of the black community changed almost overnight, in a manner that temporarily left the leadership of the emergent community at...

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