Rethinking the African Diaspora: The Making of a Black Atlantic World in the Bight of Benin and Brazil

by Bay,Edna G.; Bay,Edna G.

• ISBN13: 9780714681580
• ISBN10: 071468158X
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2001-09-01
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

One of the most heavily travelled migration routes from Old World to New was the trajectory of slave ships that left the coast of West Africa along the Bight of Benin and landed their human cargo in Brazil. An estimated two million persons over the course of some 250 years were forced migrants along this route, arriving mainly in the Brazilian province of Bahia. Earlier generations of scholars studied this southern portion of the slave trade simply as an east-west movement of enslaved persons stripped of identity and culture, or they looked for possible "retentions" of Africa among descendants of slaves in the Americas. As a result of new research, we can now paint a more complex picture of peoples and cultures in the south Atlantic, from the earliest period of the slave trade up to the present. The nine papers in this volume indicate that a dynamic and continuous movement of peoples east as well as west across the Atlantic forged diverse and vibrant re-inventions and re-interpretations of the rich mix ofcultures represented by Africans and peoples of African descent on both continents.

Table of Contents

Introduction	1	(3)
Kristin Mann
Edna G. Bay
Shifting Paradigms in the Study of the African Diaspora and of Atlantic History and Culture	3	(19)
Kristin Mann
The Evolution of the Brazilian Community in Ouidah	22	(20)
Robin Law
Protection, Political Exile, and the Atlantic Slave-Trade: History and Collective Memory in Dahomey	42	(19)
Edna G. Bay
Some Reflections on the Brazilian Legacy in Dahomey	61	(11)
Elisee Soumonni
The Identity, Contributions, and Ideology of the Aguda (Afro-Brazilians) of the Gulf of Benin: A Reinterpretation	72	(11)
Olabiyi Babalola Yai
Buying and Selling Korans in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro	83	(8)
Alberto Da Costa E Silva
The Jeje in the Tambor de Mina of Maranhao and in the Candomble of Bahia	91	(25)
Luis Nicolau Pares
Candomble in Nineteenth-Century Bahia: Priests, Followers, Clients	116	(19)
Joao Jose Reis
Africa in the Reinvention of Nineteenth-Century Afro-Bahian Identity	135	(20)
Kim D. Butler
Notes on Contributors	155	(2)
Index	157