Oxford University Press, USA
Becoming African in America: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic
Becoming African in America: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic
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The first slaves imported to America did not see themselves as African but rather as Temne, Igbo, or Yoruban. In Becoming African in America, James Sidbury reveals how an African identity emerged in the late eighteenth-century Atlantic world, tracing the development of African from a
degrading term connoting savage people to a word that was a source of pride and unity for the diverse victims of the Atlantic slave trade.
In this wide-ranging work, Sidbury first examines the work of black writers--such as Ignatius Sancho in England and Phillis Wheatley in America--who created a narrative of African identity that took its meaning from the diaspora, a narrative that began with enslavement and the experience of
the Middle Passage, allowing people of various ethnic backgrounds to become African by virtue of sharing the oppression of slavery. He looks at political activists who worked within the emerging antislavery moment in England and North America in the 1780s and 1790s; he describes the rise of the
African church movement in various cities--most notably, the establishment of the African Methodist Episcopal Church as an independent denomination--and the efforts of wealthy sea captain Paul Cuffe to initiate a black-controlled emigration movement that would forge ties between Sierra Leone and
blacks in North America; and he examines in detail the efforts of blacks to emigrate to Africa, founding Sierra Leone and Liberia.
Elegantly written and astutely reasoned, Becoming African in America weaves together intellectual, social, cultural, religious, and political threads into an important contribution to African American history, one that fundamentally revises our picture of the rich and complicated roots of
African nationalist thought in the U.S. and the black Atlantic.
Author: James Sidbury
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 04/01/2009
Pages: 304
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.00w x 0.70d
ISBN: 9780195382945
degrading term connoting savage people to a word that was a source of pride and unity for the diverse victims of the Atlantic slave trade.
In this wide-ranging work, Sidbury first examines the work of black writers--such as Ignatius Sancho in England and Phillis Wheatley in America--who created a narrative of African identity that took its meaning from the diaspora, a narrative that began with enslavement and the experience of
the Middle Passage, allowing people of various ethnic backgrounds to become African by virtue of sharing the oppression of slavery. He looks at political activists who worked within the emerging antislavery moment in England and North America in the 1780s and 1790s; he describes the rise of the
African church movement in various cities--most notably, the establishment of the African Methodist Episcopal Church as an independent denomination--and the efforts of wealthy sea captain Paul Cuffe to initiate a black-controlled emigration movement that would forge ties between Sierra Leone and
blacks in North America; and he examines in detail the efforts of blacks to emigrate to Africa, founding Sierra Leone and Liberia.
Elegantly written and astutely reasoned, Becoming African in America weaves together intellectual, social, cultural, religious, and political threads into an important contribution to African American history, one that fundamentally revises our picture of the rich and complicated roots of
African nationalist thought in the U.S. and the black Atlantic.
Author: James Sidbury
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 04/01/2009
Pages: 304
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.00w x 0.70d
ISBN: 9780195382945
About the Author
James Sidbury is Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Ploughshares Into Swords: Race, Rebellion, and Identity in Gabriel's Virginia.
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