Africa and the Americas: Interconnections during the Slave Trade

Abstract

The collection Africa and the Americas: Interconnections during the Slave Trade stems from a conference held at York University in October 2000.It testifies to the fruitful dialogue among specialists of Africa and the Americas established through the efforts of Paul Lovejoy and his associates in the Nigerian Hinterland Project, now Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on the Global Migrations of African Peoples.[1]Editors José Curto and Renée Soulodre-LaFrance introduce the collection by asserting its original contribution to the reconceptualization of Atlantic History, a field that according to them suffered from the Eurocentrism embedded in one of its most influential propositions, and from limitations in the ones that acknowledged Africa's central role in the Atlantic.[2] Unlike the one-way flow in Thornton's classic book, the editors wanted this collection to stress a multi-directional flow of people, products, and ideas, not only from Africa to the Americas, but also back to Africa.And while acknowledging Gilroy's commitment to the idea of interconnections between Africa and the Americas, they rightly stress the need to document those interconnections prior to 1850 and in the South Atlantic.The book is therefore framed to explore "the circuitous linkages between Africa and the Americas during the era of the slave trade," and aims at providing "a refreshing statement on the state of the scholarship in the field, a road map for future research, and an integrative model for studying the Atlantic world in all of its complexity and fluidity" (p. 7).The emphasis on Brazil (eight out of twelve essays) stems from the conference itself and accounts for imbalance if one claims to be dealing with the whole of Atlantic history.Despite the conceptual gap, the focus on the peculiar dynamic and unique features of the Portuguese South Atlantic strengthened the collection's demonstration of a complex approach to the theme of trans-oceanic connections.To the editors' credit, the remaining essays, while dealing with other regions of the African Diaspora in the Americas entertain a close dialogue with the central questions addressed in the collection: cultural transformations, negotiations of authority and the social nexus of spiritual or religious practices.The first essay, an assessment of the volume of the Atlantic slave trade conducted by the major carriers (British, Portuguese, French, Dutch, Spanish, North American and Scandinavian) prepared by David Eltis, Stephen Berendt and David Richardson with the records of the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, has been outdated since their own new

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 103 citations exist upstream.