scholarly journals Ships on the Wall: Retracing African Trade Routes from Marseille, France

Genealogy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 27
Author(s):  
Helen A. Regis
Keyword(s):  
New Orleans ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Diaspora Studies ◽  
African History ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Trade Routes ◽  
French Family ◽  
Porto Novo

With this essay on decolonizing ways of knowing, I seek to understand the phantom histories of my father’s French family. Filling in silences in written family accounts with scholarship on Marseille’s maritime commerce, African history, African Diaspora studies, and my own archival research, I seek to reconnect European, African, and Caribbean threads of my family story. Travelling from New Orleans to Marseille, Zanzibar, Ouidah, Porto-Novo, Martinique and Guadeloupe, this research at the intersections of personal and collective heritage links critical genealogies to colonial processes that structured the Atlantic world. Through an exploration of family documents, literature, and art, I travel the trade routes of la Maison Régis.

Romancing the Stone: Academe’s Illusive Template for African Diaspora Studies

1996 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 38-39
Author(s):  
Melina Pappademos
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Graduate School ◽  
Diaspora Studies ◽  
North Americans ◽  
History Of ◽  
America South ◽  
Research Plan ◽  
The Caribbean

I began graduate school in 1994 to study the history of American peoples of African descent; I saw important similarities between their cultures and their resistance struggles and sought to develop a comparative project. However, as I began casting my long term research plan— which was to compare Afro-Cubans and Afro-North Americans—I discovered and uncovered many stumbling blocks. The primary one was that academe grouped African descended people by their European and colonially derived relationships (ex: North America, Latin America, South America, and the Caribbean) and not by their Black derived positions. I may have been naive but this seemed problematic to me.

Decolonial Theology in the North Atlantic World

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-88
Author(s):  
Joseph Drexler-Dreis
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
North Atlantic ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
The United States ◽  
The North ◽  
The North Atlantic ◽  
Relations Of Power ◽  
General Perspective

Abstract This essay develops a response to the historical situation of the North Atlantic world in general and the United States in particular through theological reflection. It offers an overview of some decolonial perspectives with which theologians can engage, and argues for a general perspective for a decolonial theology as a possible response to modern/colonial structures and relations of power, particularly in the United States. Decolonial theory holds together a set of critical perspectives that seek the end of the modern/colonial world-system and not merely a democratization of its benefits. A decolonial theology, it is argued, critiques how the confinement of knowledge to European traditions has closed possibilities for understanding historical encounters with divinity, and thus possibilities of critical reflection. A decolonial theology reflects critically on a historical situation in light of faith in a divine reality, the understanding of which is liberated from the monopoly of modern/colonial ways of knowing, in order to catalyze social transformation.

African Diaspora in Asia

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hideaki Suzuki
Keyword(s):  
African Diaspora ◽  
Arabian Peninsula ◽  
Political Power ◽  
European History ◽  
Current Understanding ◽  
African History ◽  
African Migrants ◽  
Geographical Boundary ◽  
African Migration ◽  
Asian History

The presence of Africans in Asia and their migration around it is one of the least-studied subjects in all of Asian history. The same is true for studies of the African diaspora, but that does not mean that African migration lacks significance in either field. Existing scholarship reveals that Africans traveled to and settled in various regions in Asia, from the Arabian Peninsula to Nagasaki. While there were free African migrants in Asia, a larger number of them arrived as slaves, transported there by both local and European traders. Conditions for the forced immigrants varied and not all of them remained permanently un-free, with some even eventually coming to obtain political power. To understand their dispersal and presence in Asia does more than simply broaden our current understanding of the African diaspora; it also enables us to understand that the African diaspora is a global phenomenon. That improved understanding can in turn break down the geographical boundary of Asian history and connect it not only to African history but to European history too. To do that, the topic requires scholars to challenge the methodological limits of current historical studies.

The Somatics of Syncretism: Tying Body and Soul in Haitian Religion

2010 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 379-403 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terry Rey ◽  
Karen Richman
Keyword(s):  
African Diaspora ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
African Religion ◽  
Body And Soul ◽  
Religious Syncretism ◽  
National Boundaries ◽  
And Performance

The convergence of African religion and Christianity in the Atlantic world has inspired some of the most significant and most analyzed examples of syncretism in the study of religion. Scholarly discussions of these phenomena, however, tend to portray religions like Vodou in Haiti and Candomblé in Brazil as mergers of various Euro-Christian and ‘‘traditional’’ African elements that chiefly result from processes of cognitive ideation, thereby blurring the integrative somatic dimensions of religious syncretism. Modes of embodying knowledge, power, and morality are thus largely absent from the discussion of religious syncretism in Haitian Vodou and Catholicism, as well as other contact-cultural religions, whose congregational and performance spaces now span national boundaries. Drawing upon the historiography of Kongolese and Haitian religion, and on our multi-site ethnographic research among religious communities in Haiti, to think about religious syncretism in the African diaspora, this paper focuses on two key metaphors of mimetic knowledge and embodiment, mare and pwen (tying and point), arguing that they are both fundamental processes in Haitian religious syncretism and essential tropes for understanding Haitian Vodou and Catholicism, processes that are of predominantly Central African, and especially Kongolese, origin.

Political Pamphlets

2019 ◽  
pp. 187-203
Author(s):  
Stephen Shapiro
Keyword(s):  
New Orleans ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Critical History ◽  
Lost Work ◽  
Political Conservatism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Pamphlets ◽  
Spontaneous Conversion

This chapter traces the critical history of Charles Brockden Brown’s political pamphlets of 1803 and 1809 from the dominant reception of them as evidence of Brown’s so-called spontaneous conversion to political conservatism and bourgeois perspectives. The two 1803 pamphlets, on the question of American invasion of New Orleans to prevent Napoleon from acquiring it, need to be contextualized within the overall environment for politically progressive writers in the circum-Atlantic world in a period of revanchist conservatism. The 1809 Address to the Congress has a different tone and perspective. In the absence of an unexpected discovery of Brown’s lost work, a two-volume treatise on geography, the 1809 Address can stand as the closest, least rhetorically ambiguous account of Brown’s outlook on politics.

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