Abstract
In November 1733, a great revolt initiated by a large group of enslaved Africans broke out on the Danish West Indian island of St. John. The rebels were defined as belonging to a specific African ethnic group, and the event is thus an interesting case for studying how Africans in American slave societies used ethnic identities when they had to rebuild their lives, which had been turned around by the Middle Passage. The ethnic term assigned to the rebels, “Amina”, is complicated, since it cannot be found in contemporary sources describing Africa. The chapter therefore discusses in what sense such “African” terms referred directly to African geo-cultural entities, in what sense they were more or less creolised categories influenced by the American context, and how group identification referring to Africa mattered in a creolised daily life in the colony.
The chapter is based on parts of my Ph.D. thesis from Lund University (Sebro 2010:128–134).
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Sebro, L. (2013). The 1733 Slave Revolt on the Island of St. John: Continuity and Change from Africa to the Americas. In: Naum, M., Nordin, J. (eds) Scandinavian Colonialism and the Rise of Modernity. Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology, vol 37. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6202-6_15
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