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.
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.
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.
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.
