Sample Comprehensive Exams Reading List for Subject Field:

The Atlantic African Diaspora

Scope of the field:

This list explores the history of the African Diaspora in the Atlantic World roughly from 1457 to 1888. Its primary emphasis is on people of African descent in the Americas, Africa, and Europe. The books listed concern themselves with the creation of new black communities on both sides of the ocean as a result of forced and voluntary migrations; the texture of those communities; relationships between black and white, African and European (and Native American where applicable); the transition from ethnicity (Kongo, Igbo, Fon) to African to black or African-American or Afro-Latino in the Americas; the creative and contrasting ways that communities of color responded to slavery, freedom, and racial oppression on both sides of the Atlantic; the parameters of the Afro-Atlantic; debates on black cultural “retentions”, “survivals” and “worldview”; African cultural and intellectual production among blacks in the Americas; gender, race and class intersections in the Americas. This list also incorporates histories of the visual, literary and performance art of the Diaspora, histories of gender and sexuality, and religious histories of the Diaspora in order to complete a picture of Afro-Atlantic life before 1888.

Surveys of the African Diaspora/Multiple Subjects (Books: 5, Articles: 1)

*Gomez, Michael. Reversing Sail: A History of the African Diaspora. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

*Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo. Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.

*Hine, Darlene Clark, and Jacqueline McLeod, eds. Crossing Boundaries: Comparative History of Black People in Diaspora. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.

*Kelley, Robin D. G., and Tiffany Ruby Patterson. “Unfinished Migrations: Reflections on the African Diaspora and the Making of the Modern World.” African Studies Review 43 (April 2000): 11-68.

Thornton, John. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Walker, Sheila S. African Roots/African Cultures: Africa in the Creation of the Americas. Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, 2001.

West Africa and the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Books: 9, Articles: 1)

Boubacar, Barry. Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Inikori, Joseph E., ed. Forced Migration: The Impact of the Export Slave Trade on African Societies. New York: Africana Publishing Company, 1982.

 

Law, Robin. Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slaving “Port” 1727-1892. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004.

 

Lovejoy, Paul. Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Manning, Patrick. Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

 

Meillassoux, Claude. The Anthropology of Slavery: The Womb of Iron and Gold. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

 

Miller, Joseph. “History and Africa/Africa and History,” American Historical Review 104 (February 1999): 1-32.

Northrup, David. Africa’s Discovery of Europe, 1450-1850. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Hawthorne, Walter. Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves: Transformations along the Guinea-Bissau Coast, 1400–1900. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2003.

 

Thornton, John. The Kingdom of Kongo: Civil War and Transition, 1641-1718. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983.

 

 

The Atlantic Slave Trade/The Middle Passage (Books: 4)

Curtin, Philip. The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969.

Diedrich, Maria, Henry Louis Gates, and Carla Pederson. Black Imagination and the Middle Passage. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

*Eltis, David. The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Klein, Herbert. The Atlantic Slave Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Atlantic Creoles and Early Societies with Slaves (1450 to 1680) (Books: 5, Articles: 5)

*Bennett, Herman. Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570-1640. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003.

*+Berlin, Ira. “From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African-American Society in Mainland North America.” William and Mary Quarterly, 53 (1996): 251-288.

Brooks, George E. Eurafricans in Western Africa: Commerce, Social Status, Gender, and Religious Observance from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003.

Herrera, Robinson A. “‘Por Que No Sabemos Firmar’: Black Slaves in Early Guatemala.” The Americas 57 (October 2000): 247-267.

Lane, Kris E. “Captivity and Redemption: Aspects of Slave Life in Early Colonial Quito and Popayan.” The Americas 57 (October 2000): 225-246.

*Morel, Genaro Rodriguez. “The Sugar Economy of Espanola in the Sixteenth Century.”   In Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, ed. Stuart B. Schwartz, 85-114. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

Palmer, Colin. Slaves of the White God: Blacks in Mexico, 1570-1650. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976.

Restall, Matthew. “Black Conquistadors: Armed Africans in Early Spanish America.” The Americas 57 (October 2000): 171-205.

Saunders, A. C. de C. M. A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen in Portugal, 1444-1555. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

Shyllon, F. O. Black People in Britain, 1555-1833. London: Oxford University Press, 1977.

 

 

 

Spread of Slave Societies in the Americas and Europe, Black Migrations and Creation of Commercial Economies (1530 to 1780) (Books: 9, Articles: 2)

*+Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.

*+Brown, Kathleen M. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race and Power in Colonial Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

Carney, Judith. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.

*Curtin, Phillip. The Rise of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

*Dunn, Richard S. Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

Klein, Herbert. African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Littlefield, Daniel C. Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991.

*+Morgan, Edmund. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 1975.

*Phillips, William D.. “Sugar in Iberia.”   In Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, ed. Stuart B. Schwartz, 27-41. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

*^Reidy, Joseph P. “‘Negro Election Day’ and Black Community Life in New England, 1750-1860,” Marxist Perspective 1 (1978): 102-117.

*Schwartz, Stuart. Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550-1835. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Africans and Afro-Creoles: Black Life in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century (Books: 22, Articles: 2)

Bay, Edna G. Wives of the Leopard: Gender, Politics and Culture in the Kingdom of Dahomey. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998.

*+Berlin, Ira. Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Bush, Barbara. Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650-1838. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.

*Chambers, Douglas B. “‘He is an African but Speaks Plain’: Historical Creolization in Eighteenth-Century Virginia.” In The African Diaspora, ed. Joseph E. Harris, Alusine Jalloh, Joseph E. Inikori, Colin A. Palmer, Douglas B. Chambers, and Dale T. Graden, 100-133. Arlington: Texas A&M University Press, 1996.

*Cope, R. Douglas. The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660-1720. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994.

Falola, Toyin. The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004.

*Fuente, Alejandro de la. “Slave Law and Claims-Making in Cuba: The Tannenbaum Debate Revisited,” Law and History Review 22 (Summer 2004): 339-370.

 

*Gomez, Michael. Exchanging Our County Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

*Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo. Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992.

Heywood, Linda, ed. Central Africans and Cultural Transformation in the American Diaspora. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

+Kulikoff, Allan. Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680-1800. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986.

Landers, Jane. Black Society in Spanish Florida: Blacks in the New World. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999.

*Moitt, Bernard. Women and Slavery in the French Antilles, 1635-1848. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.

Morgan, Jennifer. Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.

*+Morgan, Phillip. Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Mullin, Michael. Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean, 1736-1831. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1002.

 

Peabody, Sue. ‘There Are No Slaves in France’: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Regime. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

 

*^Pierson, William. Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro-Americna Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988.

 

*Rothman, Joshua D. Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families Across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787-1861. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

 

*Sobel, Mechal. The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth Century Virginia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987.

*Sparks, Randy. The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.

*Sweet, James. Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441-1770. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

*Wood, Peter. Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1975.

Resistance and Rebellion (Books: 8, Articles: 2)

da Costa, Emilia Viotti. Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Craton, Michael. Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982.

Diouf, Sylviane A., ed. Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003.

*Egerton, Douglas R. Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

*Franklin, John Hope and Loren Schweninger. Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

*Johnson, Michael P. “Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators.” William and Mary Quarterly 58, 4 (2001): 915-976.

Paquette, Robert L. Sugar is made with Blood: The Conspiracy of La Escalera and the Conflict between Empires over Slavery in Cuba. Middletown, CN: Wesleyan University Press, 1988.

*Reis, Joao Jose. Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.

*Villa-Flores, Javier. “‘To Lose One’s Soul’: Blasphemy and Slavery in New Spain, 1596-1669,” Hispanic American Historical Review 82 (August 2002): 435-468.

Maroonage (Books: 3, Articles 3)

Bilby, Kenneth. True-Born Maroons. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005.

*Gomes, Flavio dos Santos. “A ‘Safe Haven’: Runaway Slaves, Mocambos, and Borders in Colonial Amazonia, Brazil,” Hispanic American Historical Review 87 (October 2002): 469-498.

*de Groot, Silvia W., Catherine A. Christen and Franklin Wright. “Maroon communities in the circum-Caribbean.” In General History of the Caribbean. Vol 3, The Slave Societies of the Caribbean, ed. Franklin Knight, 139-169. London: UNESCO Publishing, 1997.

 

Price, Richard. First-Time: The Historical Vision of an African American People. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.

Price, Richard. Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979.

*Schwartz, Stuart B. “Rethinking Palmares: Slave Resistance in Colonial Brazil.” In Slaves, Peasants and Rebels: Reconsidering Brazilian Slavery. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992.

Free People of Color (Books: 13, Articles: 1)

*Bell, Caryn Cosse. Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana, 1718-1868. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997.

*Berlin, Ira. Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South. New York, NY: Pantheon Press, 1974.

Christine, Mavis. The Politics of Change in a Slave Society: A Sociopolitical History of the Free Coloreds of Jamaica.” Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1976.

Cohen, David W. and Jack P. Greene, eds. Neither Slave nor Free: The Freedman of African Descent in the Slave Societies of the New World. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972.

 

Cox, Edward C. Free Coloreds in the Slave Societies of St. Kitts and Grenada, 1743-1833. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984.

Garrigus, John D. Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

*Gaspar, David Barry and Darlene Clark Hine, eds. Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004.

*Gould, Virginia Meacham. “The Free Creoles of Color of the Antebellum Gulf Ports of Mobile and Pensacola: A Struggle for the Middle Ground.” In Creoles of Color of the Gulf South, ed. James H. Dormon, 28-50. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996.

*Hanger, Kimberly S. Bounded Lives, Bounded Places: Free Black Society in Colonial New Orleans, 1769-1803. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997.

Johnson, Michael P., and James L. Roark. Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Co., 1984.

King, Stewart R. Blue Coat or Powdered Wig: Free People of Color in Pre-Revolutionary Saint Domingue. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001.

*Kinsbruner, Jay. Not of Pure Blood: The Free People of Color and Racial Prejudice in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.

*Litwack, Leon. North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961.

Schafer, Judith K. Becoming Free, Remaining Free: Manumission and Enslavement in New Orleans, 1846-1862. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003

*Vinson, Ben. Bearing Arms of His Majesty: the Free-Colored Militia in Colonial Mexico. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001.

Age of Revolution and Early Emancipations, 1765 to 1834 (Books: 12, Articles: 1)

Blackburn, Robin. The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848. London: Verso, 1988

*Blanchard, Peter. “The Language of Liberation: Slave Voices in the Wars of Independence.” Hispanic American Historical Review 82 (October 2002): 499-523.

DuBois, Laurent. A Colony of Citizens: Revolution & Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

*DuBois, Laurent. Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Fick, Carolyn. The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990.

+Frey, Sylvia. Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.

*Gaspar, David Barry, and David Patrick Geggus. A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.

Helg, Aline. Liberty and Equality in Caribbean Colombia, 1770-1835. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

*James, C. L. R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1963.

*+Linebaugh, Peter, and Marcus Rediker, Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2000.

Melish, Joanne Pope. Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and ‘Race’ in New England, 1780-1860. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998.

*Scott, Julius. “The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communication in the Era of the Haitian Revolution.” Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1986.

Internal Slave Trades, Other Migrations (Books: 8, Articles: 1)

Bergad, Laird W., Fé Iglesias García, and María del Carmen Barcia. The Cuban Slave Market, 1790-1880. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Blyden, Nemata Amelia. West Indians in West Africa, 1808-1880: The African Diaspora in Reverse. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2000.

*Chinea, Jorge. “Race, Colonial Exploitation and West Indian Immigration in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico, 1800-1850.” The Americas 52 (April 1996): 492-519.

Clegg, Claude A. The Price of Liberty: African Americans and the Making of Liberia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

*Dorsey, Joseph C. Slave Traffic in the Age of Abolition: Puerto Rico, West Africa, and the Non-Hispanic Caribbean, 1815-1859. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003.

*Johnson, Walter, ed. The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 2004.

*Johnson, Walter. Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Miller, Floyd John. The Search for a Black Nationality: Black Emigration and Colonization, 1787-1863. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975.

^Sanneh, Lamin. Abolitionists Abroad: American Blacks and the Making of Modern West Africa. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Schuler, Monica. Alas, Alas, Kongo: A Social History of Indentured African Immigration into Jamaica, 1841-1865. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.

Black Life in Nineteenth Century Slave Societies (Books: 28, Articles: 2)

Andrews, George Reid. Afro-Latin America, 1800-2000. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2004.

*Baptist, Edward E. Creating an Old South: Middle Florida’s Plantation Frontier Before the Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

Bolster, W. Jeffrey. Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.

*Camp, Stephanie. Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

*Fett, Sharla M. Working Cures: Healing, Health and Power on Southern Slave Plantations. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

*Fogel, Robert, and Stanley Engerman. Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery. Boston, MA: Little, Brown Publishers, 1974.

Follett, Robert. The Sugar Masters: Planters and Slaves in Louisiana’s Cane World, 1820-1860. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005.

*Freyre, Gilberto. “Social Life in Brazil in the Middle of the Nineteenth Century.” Hispanic American Historical Review 5 (November 1922): 597-630.

+Genovese, Eugene. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1976.

Graham, Sandra Lauderdale. Caetana Says No: Women’s Stories from a Brazilian Slave Society. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

*Gaspar, David Barry, and Darlene Clark Hine, eds. More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996.

Howard, Phillip A. Changing History: Afro-Cuban Cabildos and Societies of Color in the Nineteenth Century. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998.

Hunefeldt, Christine. Paying the Price of Freedom: Family and Labor among Lima’s Slaves, 1800-1854. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Karasch, Mary C. Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808-1850. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987.

Kiple, Kenneth. Blacks in Colonial Cuba, 1774-1899. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1976.

Levine, Lawrence. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.

*Mann, Kristin, and Edna G. Bay, eds. Rethinking the African Diaspora: The Making of a Black Atlantic World in the Bight of Benin and Brazil. London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2001.

Moses, Wilson Jeremiah. Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Norman, William C. Van. “The Process of Cultural Change Among Cuban Bozales During the Nineteenth Century.” The Americas 2 (October 2005): 177-207.

Peterson, Carla. “Does of the Word”: African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830-1880). New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Rael, Patrick. Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

Scarano, Francisco A. Sugar and Slavery in Puerto Rico: The Plantation Economy of Ponce, 1800-1850. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press: 1984

*+Stampp, Kenneth. The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Antebellum South. New York: Vintage Books, 1956.

Stuckey, Sterling. “Slavery and the Circle of Culture.” Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

*White, Deborah G. Ar’n’t I A Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South. New York: W.W. Norton, 1999.

Wilder, Craig. In the Company of Black Men: The African Influence on African American Culture in New York City. New York: New York University Press, 2001.

 

Abolition, Late Emancipations (1808 to 1888) (Books: 16, Articles: 2)

*Blacket, R. J. M. Building an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement, 1830-1860. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983.

*Butler, Kim. “From Black History to Diasporan History: Brazilian Abolition in Afro-Atlantic Context.” African Studies Review 43 (April 2000): 125-139.

Conrad, Robert. The Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 1850-1888. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1972.

Cooper, Frederick, Thomas Holt and Rebecca J. Scott. Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

*Ferrer, Ada. Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation and Revolution, 1868-1898. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

*Foner, Eric. Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and its Legacy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983.

+Hahn, Steven. A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South, from Slavery to the Great Migration. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Holt, Thomas. The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832-1938. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

*Peterson, Carla. “Does of the Word”: African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830-1880). New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

*Rael, Patrick. Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

Saville, Julie. The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Laborer in South Carolina, 1860-1870. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. Empire and Anti-Slavery: Spain, Cuba and Puerto Rico, 1833-1874. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999.

Scott, Rebecca. The Abolition of Slavery and the Aftermath of Emancipation in Brazil. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1988.

Scott, Rebecca. Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2005.

Scully, Pamela and Diana Paton, eds. Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.

Stauffer, John. The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.

 

Weinstein, Barbara. “The Decline of the Progressive Planter and the Rise of Subaltern Agency: Shifting Narratives of Slave Emancipation in Brazil.” In Reclaiming the Political in Latin American History: Essays from the North, ed. Gilbert M. Joseph. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001.

Black Family Life (Books: 4, Articles: 1)

+Gutman, Herbert. The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925. New York: Vintage Books, 1977.

*+Jones, Jacqueline. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family from Slavery to the Present. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1995.

*Miles, Tiya. Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom. Berkley: University of California Press, 2005.

*+Penningroth, Dylan C. The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth Century South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

*Stevenson, Brenda E. Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1006.

also see works in: Africans and Afro-Creoles, Black Life in 19th Century, Free People of Color

Religion and Spirituality (Books: 13)

*Brandon, George. Santeria from Africa to the New World: The Dead Sell Memories. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.

*Brown, Vincent. “Slavery and the Spirits of the Dead: Mortuary Politics in Jamaica.” Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 2002.

*Campbell, James T. Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

*Creel, Margaret Washington. A Peculiar People: Slave Religion and Community-Culture among the Gullahs. New York: New York University Press, 1988.

Diouf, Sylviane. Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas. New York: New York University Press, 1998.

*Frey, Sylvia, and Betty Wood. Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

*^Glaude, Eddie. Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth Century Black America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

*Harding, Rachel E. A Refuge in Thunder: Candomble and Alternative Spaces of Blackness. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.

*Matory, J. Lorand. Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomble. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.

*Murphy, Joseph, ed. Oshun Across the Waters: A Yoruban Godddess in Africa and the Americas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.

*Raboteau, Albert J. Slave Religion: The ‘Invisible Institution’ in the Antebellum South. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Reis, Joao Jose. Death is a Festival: Funeral Rites and Rebellion in Nineteenth-Century Brazil. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

*Sensbach, Jon F. Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.

Arts and Culture (Books: 10, Articles: 4)

Abraham, Roger. Singing the Master: The Emergence of African American Culture in the Plantation South. New York: Pantheon Books, 1992.

Brooks, Joanne, and John Saillant. “Face Zion Forward”: First Writers of the Black Atlantic, 1785-1798. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 2002.

Burton, Richard. Afro-Creole: Power Opposition and Play in the Caribbean. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997.

Chvaicer, Maya Talmon. “The Criminalization of Capoeira in Nineteenth Century Brazil.” Hispanic American Historical Review 82 (August 2002): 525-547.

Dirks, Robert. The Black Saturnalia: Conflict and Its Ritual Expression on British West Indian Slave Plantations. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1987.

*Palmie, Stephan. Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity & Tradition. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002.

Piedra, Jose. “Literary Whiteness and the Afro-Hispanic Difference,” In The Bounds of Race: Perspectives on Hegemony and Resistance, ed. Dominick LaCapra, 278-310. New York, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991.

Roach Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1996.

Scarano, Francisco. “The Jibaro Masquerade and the Subaltern Politics of Creole Identity Formation in Puerto Rico, 1745-1823.” American Historical Review 101 (December 1996): 1398-1431.

Smith, Ronald R. “They Sing with the Voice of the Drum: Afro-Panamanian Musical Traditions.” In More Than Drumming: Essays on African and Afro-Latin Music and Musicians, ed. Irene V. Jackson, 163-198. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985.

Thompson, Robert Farris. Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy. New York: Random House, 1983.

Vlach, John Michael. By the Work of Their Hands: Studies in Afro-American Folklife. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1991.

*Walker, Daniel. No More, No More: Slavery and Cultural Resistance in Havana and New Orleans. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.

White, Shane, and Graham White. Stylin’: African American Expressive Culture from Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998.

Comparative Race Relations (Books: 7)

*Degler, Carl. Neither Black Nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986.

*Holt, Thomas C, ed. William and Mary Quarterly Special Issue: Purity of Blood and the Social Order 61 (July 2004).

Jordan, Winthrop. White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968.

*Tannenbaum, Frank. Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1946.

Whitten, Norman E. and Arlene Torres. Blackness in Latin America and the Caribbean: Social Dynamics and Cultural Transformations. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.

Wright, Winthrop. Café Con Leche: Race, Class and National Image in Venezuela. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990.

 

 

Theory and Historiography (Books: 5, Articles: 3)

*Butler, Kim.   “Defining Diaspora, Refining a Discourse.” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 10 (Fall 2001): 189-219.

 

*Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Frazier, E. Franklin. The Negro Family in the United States. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

 

Harris, Joseph, ed. Global Dimensios of the African Diaspora. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1981.

*Herskovits, Melville J. The Myth of the Negro Past. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1958.

*Lewis, Earl. “To Turn as on a Pivot: Writing African Americans into a History of Overlapping Diasporas.” American Historical Review 100 (June 1995): 765-787.

*Lovejoy, Paul E. “The African Diaspora: Revisionist Interpretations of Ethnicity, Culture, and Religion under Slavery,” Studies in the World History of Slavery, Abolition, and Emancipation, 2 (1997). (available online at: http://www.h-net.msu.edu/~slavery/essays/esy970love.html)

*Mann, Kristin. “Shifting Paradigms in the Study of the African Diaspora and of Atlantic History and Culture.” Slavery and Abolition 22 (June 2001): 3-21.

*Mintz, Sidney and Richard Price. An Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American Past: A Caribbean Perspective. Philadelphia, PA: Institute for Human Isues, 1976.

*Piot, Charles. “Atlantic Aporias: Africa and Gilroy’s Black Atlantic,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 100 (2001), 155-70.

*Shepperson, George. “The African Abroad or the African Diaspora” in Terence Ranger, ed., Emerging Themes in African History. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1968.

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Final Total: 181 Books, 35 Articles

Last updated: December 2007 – do not use without updating key texts!