African-Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry

African-Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry PDF Author: Ras Michael Brown
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107024099
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Examines perceptions of the natural world in ideas and practices of African-descended communities in South Carolina from the colonial period to the twentieth century.

African-Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry

African-Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry PDF Author: Ras Michael Brown
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107024099
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Examines perceptions of the natural world in ideas and practices of African-descended communities in South Carolina from the colonial period to the twentieth century.

African-Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry

African-Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry PDF Author: Ras Michael Brown
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description


Rituals of Resistance

Rituals of Resistance PDF Author: Jason R. Young
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807132791
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
In Rituals of Resistance Jason R. Young explores the religious and ritual practices that linked West-Central Africa with the Lowcountry region of Georgia and South Carolina during the era of slavery. The choice of these two sites mirrors the historical trajectory of the transatlantic slave trade which, for centuries, transplanted Kongolese captives to the Lowcountry through the ports of Charleston and Savannah. Analyzing the historical exigencies of slavery and the slave trade that sent not only men and women but also cultural meanings, signs, symbols, and patterns across the Atlantic, Young argues that religion operated as a central form of resistance against slavery and the ideological underpinnings that supported it. Through a series of comparative chapters on Christianity, ritual medicine, burial practices, and transmigration, Young details the manner in which Kongolese people, along with their contemporaries and their progeny who were enslaved in the Americas, utilized religious practices to resist the savagery of the slave trade and slavery itself. When slaves acted outside accepted parameters -- in transmigration, spirit possession, ritual internment, and conjure -- Young explains, they attacked not only the condition of being a slave, but also the systems of modernity and scientific rationalism that supported slavery. In effect, he argues, slave spirituality played a crucial role in the resocialization of the slave body and behavior away from the oppressions and brutalities of the master class. Young's work expands traditional scholarship on slavery to include both the extensive work done by African historians and current interdisciplinary debates in cultural studies, anthropology, and literature. Drawing on a wide range of primary sources from both American and African archives, including slave autobiography, folktales, and material culture, Rituals of Resistance offers readers a nuanced understanding of the cultural and religious connections that linked blacks in Africa with their enslaved contemporaries in the Americas. Moreover, Young's groundbreaking work gestures toward broader themes and connections, using the case of the Kongo and the Lowcountry to articulate the development of a much larger African Atlantic space that connected peoples, cultures, languages, and lives on and across the ocean's waters.

African American Life in the Georgia Lowcountry

African American Life in the Georgia Lowcountry PDF Author: Philip Morgan
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820343072
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
The lush landscape and subtropical climate of the Georgia coast only enhance the air of mystery enveloping some of its inhabitants—people who owe, in some ways, as much to Africa as to America. As the ten previously unpublished essays in this volume examine various aspects of Georgia lowcountry life, they often engage a central dilemma: the region's physical and cultural remoteness helps to preserve the venerable ways of its black inhabitants, but it can also marginalize the vital place of lowcountry blacks in the Atlantic World. The essays, which range in coverage from the founding of the Georgia colony in the early 1700s through the present era, explore a range of topics, all within the larger context of the Atlantic world. Included are essays on the double-edged freedom that the American Revolution made possible to black women, the lowcountry as site of the largest gathering of African Muslims in early North America, and the coexisting worlds of Christianity and conjuring in coastal Georgia and the links (with variations) to African practices. A number of fascinating, memorable characters emerge, among them the defiant Mustapha Shaw, who felt entitled to land on Ossabaw Island and resisted its seizure by whites only to become embroiled in struggles with other blacks; Betty, the slave woman who, in the spirit of the American Revolution, presented a “list of grievances” to her master; and S'Quash, the Arabic-speaking Muslim who arrived on one of the last legal transatlantic slavers and became a head man on a North Carolina plantation. Published in association with the Georgia Humanities Council.

Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora

Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora PDF Author: Linda M. Heywood
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521002783
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Slave Counterpoint

Slave Counterpoint PDF Author: Philip D. Morgan
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 0807838535
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 730

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Book Description
On the eve of the American Revolution, nearly three-quarters of all African Americans in mainland British America lived in two regions: the Chesapeake, centered in Virginia, and the Lowcountry, with its hub in South Carolina. Here, Philip Morgan compares and contrasts African American life in these two regional black cultures, exploring the differences as well as the similarities. The result is a detailed and comprehensive view of slave life in the colonial American South. Morgan explores the role of land and labor in shaping culture, the everyday contacts of masters and slaves that defined the possibilities and limitations of cultural exchange, and finally the interior lives of blacks--their social relations, their family and kin ties, and the major symbolic dimensions of life: language, play, and religion. He provides a balanced appreciation for the oppressiveness of bondage and for the ability of slaves to shape their lives, showing that, whatever the constraints, slaves contributed to the making of their history. Victims of a brutal, dehumanizing system, slaves nevertheless strove to create order in their lives, to preserve their humanity, to achieve dignity, and to sustain dreams of a better future.

Black Freedom in the Age of Slavery

Black Freedom in the Age of Slavery PDF Author: John Garrison Marks
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781643361239
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Prior to the abolition of slavery, thousands of African-descended people in the Americas lived in freedom. Their efforts to navigate daily life and negotiate the boundaries of racial difference challenged the foundations of white authority--and linked the Americas together. In Black Freedom in the Age of Slavery John Garrison Marks examines how these individuals built lives in freedom for themselves and their families in two of the Atlantic World's most important urban centers: Cartagena, along the Caribbean coast of modern-day Colombia, and Charleston, in the lowcountry of North America's Atlantic coast. Marks reveals how skills, knowledge, reputation, and personal relationships helped free people of color improve their fortunes and achieve social distinction in ways that undermined whites' claims to racial superiority. Built upon research conducted on three continents, this book takes a comparative approach to understanding the contours of black freedom in the Americas. It reveals in new detail the creative and persistent attempts of free black people to improve their lives and that of their families. It examines how various paths to freedom, responses to the Haitian Revolution, opportunities to engage in skilled labor, involvement with social institutions, and the role of the church all helped shape the lived experience of free people of color in the Atlantic World. As free people of color worked to improve their individual circumstances, staking claims to rights, privileges, and distinctions not typically afforded to those of African descent, they engaged with white elites and state authorities in ways that challenged prevailing racial attitudes. While whites across the Americas shared common doubts about the ability of African-descended people to survive in freedom or contribute meaningfully to society, free black people in Cartagena, Charleston, and beyond conducted themselves in ways that exposed cracks in the foundations of American racial hierarchies. Their actions represented early contributions to the long fight for recognition, civil rights, and racial justice that continues today.

Undercurrents of Power

Undercurrents of Power PDF Author: Kevin Dawson
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812224930
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
Kevin Dawson considers how enslaved Africans carried aquatic skills—swimming, diving, boat making, even surfing—to the Americas. Undercurrents of Power not only chronicles the experiences of enslaved maritime workers, but also traverses the waters of the Atlantic repeatedly to trace and untangle cultural and social traditions.

African American Foodways

African American Foodways PDF Author: Anne Bower
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252076303
Category : African American cookery
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
Moving beyond catfish and collard greens to the soul of African American cooking

Creating and Contesting Carolina

Creating and Contesting Carolina PDF Author: Michelle LeMaster
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 161117273X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 588

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Book Description
The essays in Creating and Contesting Carolina shed new light on how the various peoples of the Carolinas responded to the tumultuous changes shaping the geographic space that the British called Carolina during the Proprietary period (1663-1719). In doing so, the essays focus attention on some of the most important and dramatic watersheds in the history of British colonization in the New World. These years brought challenging and dramatic changes to the region, such as the violent warfare between British and Native Americans or British and Spanish, the no-less dramatic development of the plantation system, and the decline of proprietary authority. All involved contestation, whether through violence or debate. The very idea of a place called Carolina was challenged by Native Americans, and many colonists and metropolitan authorities differed in their visions for Carolina. The stakes were high in these contests because they occurred in an early American world often characterized by brutal warfare, rigid hierarchies, enslavement, cultural dislocation, and transoceanic struggles for power. While Native Americans and colonists shed each other's blood to define the territory on their terms, colonists and officials built their own version of Carolina on paper and in the discourse of early modern empires. But new tensions also provided a powerful incentive for political and economic creativity. The peoples of the early Carolinas reimagined places, reconceptualized cultures, realigned their loyalties, and adapted in a wide variety of ways to the New World. Three major groups of peoples—European colonists, Native Americans, and enslaved Africans—shared these experiences of change in the Carolinas, but their histories have usually been written separately. These disparate but closely related strands of scholarship must be connected to make the early Carolinas intelligible. Creating and Contesting Carolina brings together work relating to all three groups in this unique collection.