The Transatlantic Dimensions of Ethnicity in the African Diaspora

This group of essays, resulting from research affiliated with the UNESCO Slave Route Project, explores trans-Atlantic linkages and cultural overlays during the era of slavery and after. The essays concentrate on ethnicity and culture and their manifestations on both sides of the Atlantic and draw on new methodologies and new sources relating to the emergence of the African diaspora, one of the most historical phenomena of the modern era. In exploring the cultural impact of the slave trade in Africa and the Americas, these essays contend that complex, intercontinental forces shaped the African diaspora; the repercussions being felt on both sides of the Atlantic. Rather than considering the Atlantic a barrier, crossed in one direction only, the trans-Atlantic dimensions of slaving revealed here involved a degree of interaction that requires a careful reconsideration of patterns of resistance and accommodation, allowing for an examination of the expectations of the enslaved as well as analysis of the experience of slavery. Personal experience, memory and tradition kept alive cultural forms and expressions, whether through music, poetry or other means.
The encounters forced on the enslaved generated new social relationships, more or less based on the shared horrors of the Middle Passage, but the enslaved also reshaped the ways in which people identified, redefining ethnicity in both Africa and the Americas in ways that no one could have possibly foreseen. Identity is clearly shown to be a process, the outcome of intermixing, of borrowing and of appropriation.