A01=Michael A. Gomez
African American culture
African diaspora
Author_Michael A. Gomez
Category=JBSL
Category=NHK
Category=NHTB
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethnic groups
transatlantic slave trade
Product details
- ISBN 9780807846940
- Weight: 555g
- Dimensions: 157 x 233mm
- Publication Date: 30 Mar 1998
- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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The transatlantic slave trade brought individuals from diverse African regions and cultures to a common destiny in the American South. In this comprehensive study, Michael Gomez establishes tangible links between the African American community and its African origins and traces the process by which African populations exchanged their distinct ethnic identities for one defined primarily by the conception of race. He examines transformations in the politics, social structures, and religions of slave populations through 1830, by which time the contours of a new African American identity had begun to emerge. After discussing specific ethnic groups in Africa, Gomez follows their movement to North America, where they tended to be amassed in recognizable concentrations within individual colonies (and, later, states). For this reason, he argues, it is possible to identify particular ethnic cultural influences and ensuing social formations that heretofore have been considered unrecoverable. Using sources pertaining to the African continent as well as runaway slave advertisements, ex-slave narratives, and folklore, Gomez reveals concrete and specific links between particular African populations and their North American progeny, thereby shedding new light on subsequent African American social formation. |Recovers the diverse ethnic roots of Africans brought into slavery in the American South by identifying concrete links between African populations and their North American progeny.
Michael A. Gomez is a professor of history at New York University.
