Seminar Questions
- Did the Middle Passage represent cultural change or cultural continuity for enslaved Africans and their New World descendants, or something in between?
- What differences might we identify between Brazil and Cuba as case studies?
- What cultural and religious institutions and practices undergirded Afro-American life in the Iberian world?
Readings: please choose two:
- Barcia, Manuel. Seeds of Insurrection: Domination and Resistance on Western Cuban Plantations, 1808-1848. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008. Chapter 1: “The African Background of Cuban Slaves,” pp. 13-24. [on Library course scans page]
- Morgan, Philip D. “The Cultural Implications of the Atlantic Slave Trade: African Regional Origins, American Destinations and New World Developments.” Slavery & Abolition, 18 (1997): 122-45.
- Castillo, Lisa Earl, and Luis Nicolau Parés. “Marcelina da Silva: A nineteenth-Century Candomblé Priestess in Bahia.” Slavery & Abolition, 31:1 (March 2010: 1-27.
- Matthias Rohrig Assuncao, "From Slave to Popular Culture: The Formation of Afro-Brazilian Art Forms in Nineteenth-Century Bahia and Rio de Janeiro," Iberoamericana, Nueva Epoca, ano 3, no 12, (diciembre de 2003), pp. 159-176.
Further reading:
- Thornton, John. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800. CUP, 1998 (2nd ed) [usually one of the main references cited by scholars who emphasise African cultural 'survivals']
- Mintz, S, and Price, R, The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (Boston: Beacon, 1992) [revised edition of 1976 essay “An Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American Past: A Caribbean Perspective”] [usually cited by scholars emphasising 'creolisation' model]
- Berlin, Ira. “From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African-American Society in Mainland North America.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 53 (1996): 251-88. [the Atlantic creoles idea has been taken up by many historians, including for the C19 Iberian world, beyond the context in which Berlin used it here so it's a useful reference]
- Michael Gomez, Exchanging our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identity in the Colonial and Antebellum South. UNC Press, 1998 [a classic - US-focused but fantastic read on specific African ethnicities, polities, and cultures in the era of the slave trade and useful discussion of New World cultural transformations]
- Pablo Gomez, The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic. UNC 2017
- James Sweet, <em>Domingues Alvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual history of the Atlantic World</em>, UNC 2011
