Religious dialogue, trade, slave mobility, knowledge circulation, pilgrimage and intellectual exchange, colonization, resistance, creolization: Africans have been connected to the rest of the world in every possible way.
Inequality has a history that is always complex and often contradictory. The story needs to be told, because it is this story, enriched by the contributions of all the social sciences, that can help to shape realistic proposals for greater social justice.
Laurence Ralph’s ethnography explores the various systems of punishment that injure black and brown Americans’ bodies and that contribute to maintain social hierarchies that rely on the vestiges of slavery. These injuries call for healing and overcoming trauma, and also for reparative justice.
Books & Ideas is slowing down for the summer and will be offering weekly selections of reviews and essays published over the last year. This week’s selection questions the social construction of racial identities, and the history of domination.
Until recently, the history of French colonial New Orleans was treated as an exception. Writing a total social history of 18th Century New Orleans, Cécile Vidal offers to reframe it as a Caribbean outpost of the French Empire rather than as a North American frontier town.
In 1841, the Creole, an American ship with 139 enslaved people onboard, was hijacked at sea by a group of determined rebels in their midst. Kerr-Ritchie’s book sheds new light on this iconic episode of the Revolutionary Atlantic in the 19th century, telling a tale of successful self-emancipation.
Visual artist Kara Walker’s Fons Americanus is this year’s commissioned work for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. While addressing the current debates regarding memorials, it goes beyond a mere rewriting or righting of history.
Recent contentious comments on social media in France show that the hair of Afro-descendants is still stigmatized. How is one to explain this persistence of the stigmatization of curly hair? What are the underlying political stakes of these seemingly purely aesthetic considerations?
The flourishing history of the relationship between race and health has recently turned to the origins of medicine in the United States and the decisive role played by enslaved Africans, both dead and alive. A history of duress, from which their voices nevertheless emerge.
A new exhibition at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh explores the changes undergone in Scotland in the fields of science, technology and literature over a century (1760-1860). It also offers a nuanced narrative of Scotland’s role in the British Empire.
Few histories of the African American fight for equality manage to shed their ideological bias. Caroline Rolland-Diamond offers an impressive overview that goes beyond oppositions to highlight the structuring lines of a two-century-old struggle that continues today.
Two recent books offer new perspectives on the slave system in the Caribbean, with a particular focus on Saint-Domingue. Their primary purpose – the economic development sustained by slavery – leads the authors to very different conclusions.
By studying political and legal debates over citizenship through the prism of the colonial situation in the nineteenth century, in the metropole as well as the colonies, Silyane Larcher proposes a new genealogy of citizenship and asks us to rethink how the French Republic was constructed.
Abducted in Africa, detained in Cuba, the slaves aboard the Amistad ship organised a rebellion in 1839, before reaching the United States where they were subsequently imprisoned. The survivors were ultimately taken back to Sierra Leone, following a long publicity tour set up to pay for their homeward journey.
Can we define capitalism? By acknowledging the role played by economic and philosophical idea in its development, is there not a risk of ignoring the importance of material and technical conditions? The economists Clément Carbonnier and Geoffrey Hodgson discuss this issue.
Describing how the Qur’anic school creates taalibes through the embodiment of knowledge, Ware offers a sharply revisionist history not only of West African Islamic education, but of the place of West Africans in the history of the Muslim world in general.
The slave ship was a central institution of slave trade and slavery, as well as a place of extreme violence and suffering. Its ghost still haunts America today through the persistence of racism and inequalities.
