Cultures and Societies in the Diaspora
PPT for the seminar
Seminar Questions
- What cultural and religious institutions and practices undergirded Afro-American life in the Iberian world?
- Did the Middle Passage represent cultural change or cultural continuity for enslaved Africans and their New World descendants?
- What differences might we identify between Brazil and Cuba as case studies?
Core readings: please read Matt Childs and choose 1 other:
- Matt D. Childs, The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle against Atlantic Slavery (UNC Press, 2006): [The Introduction is also useful to look at for context]
- Barcia, Manuel. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008. Chapter 1: 鈥淭he African Background of Cuban Slaves,鈥� pp. 13-24.
- Morgan, Philip D. 鈥淭he Cultural Implications of the Atlantic Slave Trade: African Regional Origins, American Destinations and New World Developments.鈥� Slavery & Abolition, 18 (1997): 122-45.
- Castillo, Lisa Earl, and Luis Nicolau Par茅s. 鈥淢arcelina da Silva: A nineteenth-Century Candombl茅 Priestess in Bahia.鈥� 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']
- Paul Christopher Johnson and Stephan Palmie, "" in Afro-Latin American Studies: An Introduction, eds. Alejandro de la Fuente & George Reid Andrews, CUP 2018.
Lovejoy, Henry B. . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018.
- Mintz, S, and Price, R, The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (Boston: Beacon, 1992) [revised edition of 1976 essay 鈥淎n Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American Past: A Caribbean Perspective鈥漖 [usually cited by scholars emphasising 'creolisation' model]
- Berlin, Ira. 鈥淔rom Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African-American Society in Mainland North America.鈥� 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, . 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, UNC 2017
- James Sweet1