The contributions to this volume were first presented in 1995 at the Thirtieth Annual Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures organized by the University of Texas at Arlington. That year’s theme, “Africa and the African Diaspora,” produced a series of papers so wide-ranging that editor Alusine Jalloh felt it best to provide the most prosaic of introductions and leave bold new statements of synthesis for another day. Joseph E. Harris’s sweeping chapter might have performed this task, but instead it simply summarizes his well-known work on the global African diaspora from ancient to modern times. Jalloh’s chapter, by contrast, considerably circumscribes the notion of diaspora to focus on the inter-West African commercial migrations of the Fula people to Sierra Leone under colonial rule. In his chapter, Joseph E. Inikori makes an important contribution to the ongoing debate over whether dependent labor practices in the African historical past can be termed “slavery.” He creatively draws from studies of medieval Europe concerned with distinctions between “serf” and “slave” to bring some terminological clarity to what has often been a muddled discussion.
The first section of Colin A. Palmer’s “Rethinking of American Slavery” is of particular interest to readers of this journal. In it he argues that the origins of American racist attitudes are to be found in Spanish and Portuguese notions of racial superiority toward African populations that were brought to the Iberian peninsula in the fifteenth century. Palmer then makes a welcome plea for a more comparative approach to understanding Atlantic slavery, noting that “almost all our slavery scholars show an abysmal ignorance of African history” (p. 85). Though music to the ears of this Africanist, Palmer does not follow through on his suggestions, and his description of African “traditional kin arrangements” is written at a level of generalization that hardly does justice to the variety of political and cultural practices in West and Central Africa during the slave trade era. Douglas B. Chamber’s interesting chapter on creolization in eighteenth-century Virginia comes closer to the mark given his demonstrated and more subtle understanding of the varied African origins of Virginia’s slave population.
In an analysis of the mid-nineteenth-century abolitionist crisis in Salvador, capital of Bahia, Dale T. Graden argues that the combination of an unprecedented arrival of Africans in the late 1840s, the fear of future slave revolts, and the devastating effects of a yellow fever epidemic impelled Bahia’s elite to end the international slave trade in 1850. At the same time, domestic and European abolitionist pressures pushed this elite to fervently defend the continued practice of slavery in Brazil itself. By 1856 this tense situation was resolved due to a crackdown on African institutions like candomblé, the sale of slaves from Bahia to points further south, and the spread of a deadly cholera epidemic that killed many of the remaining slaves. The abolitionist crisis passed and slavery continued in Brazil until 1888. Though this chapter is clearly the most “Latin American” of the book, it is the call for more comparative approaches to the study of the Atlantic that makes The African Diaspora important reading for Latin Americanists.
