West Central Africans in the Diaspora
* What were the connections between the longer histories of West Central Africa, especially today's Angola, and Brazil?
* What distinguished West Central Africans from West Africans in Brazil? (Check Lauderdale Graham's article and also the 'Nago and Mina' pieces from last week on the Yoruba)
* How, according to Slenes, did language help west central Africans build "metaphors to live by" across the Atlantic?
* What was the role of West Central Africans in religious practices, warfare, and subversive geographies in rural Matanzas, Cuba, according to Finch?
* What methods do Finch and Slenes use to uncover West Central Africans' cultural lives? How successful are they?
Core reading (choose 2)
Mariana P Candido, An African Slaving Port and the Atlantic World: Benguela and its Hinterland (CUP 2013): "Introduction," pp. 1-30.
Aisha Finch, Rethinking Slave Rebellion in Cuba, chapter 7, "African Cuban Traditions and the Making of an Insurgency"
Robert Slenes, "Metaphors to Live By in the Diaspora: Conceptual Tropes and Ontological Wordplay among Central Africans in the Middle Passage and Beyond," in Tracing Language Movement in Africa, eds. Ericka A. Albaugh and Kathryn M de Luna (OUP, 2018)
Further reading
Heywood, Linda, ed., Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora. CUP 2009
Luis Felipe Alencastro, The Trade in the Living: The Formation of Brazil in the South Atlantic in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Binghampton, SUNY 2018)
Jose Lingna Nafafe, Lourenco da Silva Mendonca and the Black Atlantic Abolitionist Movement in the Seventeenth Century, CUP 2022
Mariana Candido, Wealth, Land, and Property in Angola: A History of Dispossession, Slavery, and Inequality (CUP 2022)
John Thornton, "I am the Subject of the King of Congo:" African Political Ideology and the Haitian Revolution." Journal of World History 4:2 (Fall 1993): 181-214 [and Thornton has written widely about the history of Kongo more generally]
https://africankingdoms.co.uk/ fantastic resources on African kingdoms, including Oyo and Dahomey as well as Kongo (including a whole A-level syllabus!)
Toby Green, A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution. Allen Lane, 2019
Joseph Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730-1830. University of Wisconsin Press, 1988.
Todd Ochoa, The Society of the Dead: Quita Manaquita and Palo Praise in Cuba. University of California Press 2010.
Gladys Gonzalez Bueno, Description of a palo monte ceremony, in Stubbs, Jean, and Pedro Perez Sarduy,AfroCuba: An Anthology of Cuban Writing on Race, Politics and Culture, 1993.
Gomez, Michael Exchanging our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identity in the Colonial and Antebellum South, chapter 6 on West Central Africans in the US South
Miguel Barnet, The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave (testimony by former enslaved man Esteban Montejo in 1960s Cuba; contains descriptions of palo rituals)