Memories Of Madagascar And Slavery In The Black Atlantic

From the seventeenth century into the nineteenth, thousands of Madagascar’s people were brought to American ports as slaves. In Memories of Madagascar and Slavery in the Black Atlantic, Wendy Wilson-Fall shows that the descendants of these Malagasy slaves in the United States maintained an ethnic identity in ways that those from the areas more commonly feeding the Atlantic slave trade did not. Generations later, hundreds, if not thousands, of African Americans maintain strong identities as Malagasy descendants, yet the histories of Malagasy slaves, sailors, and their descendants have been little explored. Wilson-Fall examines how and why the stories that underlie this identity have been handed down through families—and what this says about broader issues of ethnicity and meaning-making for those whose family origins, if documented at all, have been willfully obscured by history. By analyzing contemporary oral histories as well as historical records and examining the conflicts between the two, Wilson-Fall carefully probes the tensions between the official and the personal, the written and the lived. She suggests that historically, the black community has been a melting pot to which generations of immigrants—enslaved and free—have been socially assigned, often in spite of their wish to retain far more complex identities. Innovative in its methodology and poetic in its articulation, this book bridges history and ethnography to take studies of diaspora, ethnicity, and identity into new territory.

Note: this is an abridged version of the book with references removed. The complete edition is also available. While the memorialization of slavery has generated an impressive number of publications, relatively few studies deal with this subject from a transnational, transdisciplinary and transracial standpoint. As a historical phenomenon that crossed borders and traversed national communities and ethnic groups producing alliances that did not overlap with received identities, slavery as well as its memory call for comparative investigations that may bring to light aspects obscured by the predominant visibility of US-American and British narratives of the past. This study addresses the memory of slavery from a transnational perspective. It brings into dialogue texts and practices from the transatlantic world, offering comparative analyses which interlace the variety of memories emerging in diverse national contexts and fields of study and shed light on the ways local countermemories have interacted with and responded to hegemonic narratives of slavery. The inclusion of Brazil and the French, English, and Spanish Caribbean alongside the United States and Europe, and the variety of investigative approaches-ranging from cinema, popular culture and visual culture studies to anthropology and literary studies-expand the current understanding of the slave past and how it is reimagined today. This fascinating book brings freshness to the topic by considering objects of investigation which have so far remained marginal in the academic debate, such as heroic memorials, civic landscape, white family sagas, Young Adult literature of slavery, Latin American telenovelas and filmic narrations within and beyond Hollywood. What emerges is a multifarious set of memories, which keep changing according to generation, race, gender, nation and political urgency and indicate the advancing of a dynamic, mobilized memorialization of slavery willing to move beyond mourning towards a more militant stand for justice. This is an important book for those interested in African American, American, and Latin American studies and working across literature, cinema, visual arts, and public culture. It will also be useful to public official and civil servants interested in the question of slavery and its present memory.

Brings Madagascar into the history of the African slave trade.

In The Black Urban Atlantic, eleven original essays by leading scholars from the United States, Europe, and Latin America chronicle the black experience in Atlantic ports, providing a rich and diverse portrait of the ways in which Africans experienced urban life during the era of plantation slavery.

Though the history of slavery is a central topic for African, Atlantic world and world history, most of the sources presenting research in this area are European in origin. To cast light on African perspectives, and on the point of view of enslaved men and women, this group of top Africanist scholars has examined both conventional historical sources (such as European travel accounts, colonial documents, court cases, and missionary records) and less-explored sources of information (such as folklore, oral traditions, songs and proverbs, life histories collected by missionaries and colonial officials, correspondence in Arabic, and consular and admiralty interviews with runaway slaves). Each source has a short introduction highlighting its significance and orienting the reader. This first of two volumes provides students and scholars with a trove of African sources for studying African slavery and the slave trade.

Why did Britons get up a play wherever they went? Kathleen Wilson reveals how the performance of English theater and a theatricalized way of viewing the world shaped the geopolitics and culture of empire in the long eighteenth century. Ranging across the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans to encompass Kingston, Calcutta, Fort Marlborough, St. Helena and Port Jackson as well as London and provincial towns, she shows how Britons on the move transformed peripheries into historical stages where alternative collectivities were enacted, imagined and lived. Men and women of various ethnicities, classes and legal statuses produced and performed English theater in the world, helping to consolidate a national and imperial culture. The theater of empire also enabled non-British people to adapt or interpret English cultural traditions through their own performances, as Englishness also became a production of non-English peoples across the globe.

In this book, Ana Lucia Araujo argues that despite the rupture provoked by the Atlantic slave trade, the Atlantic Ocean was never a physical barrier that prevented the exchanges between the two sides; it was instead a corridor that allowed the production of continuous relations. Araujo shows that the memorialization of slavery in Brazil and Benin was not only the result of survivals from the period of the Atlantic slave trade but also the outcome of a transnational movement that was accompanied by the continuous intervention of institutions and individuals who promoted the relations between Brazil and Benin. Araujo insists that the circulation of images was, and still is, crucial to the development of reciprocal cultural, religious, and economic exchanges and to defining what is African in Brazil and what is Brazilian in Africa. In this context, the South Atlantic is conceived as a large zone in which the populations of African descent undertake exchanges and modulate identities, a zone where the European and the Amerindian identities were also appropriated in order to build its own nature. This book shows that the public memory of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade in the South Atlantic is plural; it is conveyed not only by the descendants of the victims but also by the descendants of perpetrators. Although the slave past is a critical issue in societies that largely relied on slave labor and where the heritage of slavery is still present, the memories of this past remain very often restricted to the private space. This book shows how in Brazil and Benin social actors appropriated the slave past to build new identities, fight against social injustice, and in some cases obtain political prestige. The book illuminates how the public memory of slavery in Brazil and Benin contributes to the rise of the South Atlantic as an autonomous zone of claim for recognition for those peoples and cultures that were cruelly broken, dispersed, and depreciated by the Atlantic slave trade. Public Memory of Slavery is an important book for collections in slavery studies, memory studies, Brazilian and Latin American studies, ethnic studies, cultural anthropology, African studies and African Diaspora.Araujo sheds light on the paradoxical understandings of the slave trade insouthern Benin and the unintended results of some international efforts torecognise the history of slavery and the slave trade. [...] makes a usefuladdition to the literature because the reader is only reminded how muchAfricans and descen- dants of Africans have shaped this vast Atlantic worldterritory through divergent processes of exchange and recreation, occurringboth within and beyond the gaze of Western dis- course. (Itinerario, November 2011)The book is broad ranging and provides an introduction to numerous subjects(...) Recommended. (Choice, June 2011)