Reassembling Africa: a leading anthropologist proposes an essential library for understanding the Black Diaspora in the Americas

Black Issues Book Review, Jan-Feb, 2004 by Sheila S. Walker

* Anthropologist St. Clair Drake's Black Folk Here and There: An Essay in History and Anthropology (University of California Center for AfroAmerican Studies, February 1991) also situates African descendants within a global context, examining issues of racism and colorism over time and across geographies.

* Historian Sterling Stuckey's Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (Oxford University Press, April 1987) explores how Africans began to redefine themselves in the Americas. An essential consideration for understanding the Diaspora is the ways in which the estimated 12 to 15 million members of African ethnic and regional groups who survived the voyage to the Americas were transformed into the national African Diasporan identities of the hemisphere. Slave Culture uses the Ring Shout of the United States and other spiritual circle dances of the Americas to discuss the transformation of various African peoples who found themselves together in the Americas into the African Diasporan identities of today.

* Historian Michael A. Gomez's Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Tranformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (University of North Carolina Press, March 1998) describes how groups from the major areas of Africa who found themselves in the United States--those from the Senegambia, the Bight of Benin, Sierra Leone, the Akan-speaking areas of Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire, the Igbo of Nigeria, and Bantu-speaking populations from West Central Africa--exchanged their distinctive African "country marks" to develop an African American identity, often through collaboration in struggles against the institution of enslavement.

* Historian Rachel E. Harding, in Refuge in Thunder: Candomble and Alternative Spaces of Blackness (University of Indiana Press, February 2003), undertakes a similar task for the state of Bahia in northeastern Brazil, which has the nation's largest African-descended population. Her analysis situates the locus of the transformation of various Central and West Africans peoples into Afro-Brazilians within the evolution of the Candomble, the Afro-Brazilian religion that is the basis of much of the culture of Bahia.

* In The Big Drum Ritual of Carriacou: Praisesongs in Rememory of Flight (University of Florida Press, November 1998), ethnomusicologist Lorna McDaniel challenges the contention that Africans and their descendants did not leave written records of their history and culture. She finds these records written in the words of the songs of the big drum or nation dances of the Caribbean island of Carriacou, in which Manding, Coromanti, Igbo, and other African identities continue to exist in songs and dances of contemporary rememory.

* Linguist Maureen Warner-Lewis analyzes the continued West African Yoruba linguistic and larger cultural presence in Trinidad Yoruba: From Mother Tongue to Memory (University of Alabama Press, January 1996) and the Central African Bantu-speaking presence in Central Africa in the Caribbean: Transcending Space, Transforming Culture (University Press of the West Indies, January 2004).