The Enslavement of Africans and The Origins of the African Diaspora in the Americas
The history of the Atlantic slave trade and the enslavement of Africans and their descendants can serve as a convenient point of origin in tracing the history of the African diaspora in the Americas, but this history does not experientially exhaust the practical politics and social pursuits nor the striving for existential meanings in what, by now, in the postcolonial, postmodern era, is a multinational, transnational, and heterogeneous social formation. Enslaved Africans previously resident in the Iberian Peninsula were probably brought to the Caribbean as early as 1493 on Columbus’s second voyage to the New World. Columbus also brought sugar cane on that voyage, and by 1516 sugar grown on the island of Hispañola was shipped back to Europe. Concomitant with the founding of what would become known as the Sugar Revolution, enslaved Africans were taken directly to the New World, the Caribbean, and Brazil....
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Alleyne, M. C. (1985). A linguistic perspective on the Caribbean. In S. W. Mintz, & S. Price (Eds.), Caribbean contours (pp. 155–79). Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Andrews, G. R. (1992). Racial inequality in Brazil and the United States: A statistical comparison. Journal of Social History, 26(2), 229–263.
Anstey, R. (1976). The British slave trade 1751–1807: A comment. Journal of African History, 17(4), 606–607.
Blackburn, R. (1997). The making of New World slavery: From the baroque to the modern, 1492–1800. London: Verso.
Browning, B. Infectious rhythm: Metaphors of contagion and the spread of African culture. New York: Routledge.
Burdick, J. (1992a). The myth of racial democracy. Report on the Americas, 25(4), 40–44.
Burdick, J. (1992b). Brazil’s-black consciousness movement. Report on the Americas, 25(4), 23–27.
Carney, J. A. (2001). Black rice: The African origins of rice cultivation in the Americas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Cobb, M. (1979). Harlem, Haiti, and Havana: A comparative critical study of Langston Hughes, Jacques Roumain, Nicolás Guillén. Washington, DC: Three Continents Press.
Coppin, A., & Olsen, R. N. (1998). Earnings and ethnicity in Trinidad and Tobago. Journal of Development Studies, 34(3), 116–134.
Costa, E. V. da. (1994). Crowns of glory, tears of blood: The Demerara slave rebellion of 1823. New York: Oxford University Press.
Craton, M. (1982). Testing the chains: Resistance to slavery in the British West Indies. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Crook, L., & Johnson, R. (Eds.). (1999). Black Brazil: Culture, identity, and social mobilization. Los Angeles: Latin American Center Publications, University of California at Los Angeles.
Curtin, P. D. (1969). The Atlantic slave trade: A census. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Curtin, P. D. (1976). Measuring the Atlantic slave trade once again: A comment. Journal of African History, 17(4), 595–605.
Curto, J. C., & Lovejoy, P. E. (Eds.) (2004). Enslaving connections: changing cultures of Africa and Brazil during the era of slavery. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books.
Davis, E J. (1991). Who is black?: One nation’s definition. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
de la Fuente, A. (2001). A nation for all: Race, inequality, and politics in twentieth-century Cuba. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Dubois, L. (2004). Avengers of the New World: The story of the Haitian Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1939). Black folk: Then and now; An essay in the history and sociology of the Negro race. New York: Henry Holt and Company.
Edwards, B. H. (2003). The practice of diaspora: Literature, translation, and the rise of Black internationalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Eltis, D. (2001) The volume and structure of the Transatlantic Slave Trade: A reassessment. William and Mary Quarterly, 58(1), 17–46.
Fernández Olmos, M., & Paravisini-Gebert, L. (Eds.) (2001). Healing cultures: Art and religion as curative practices in the Caribbean and its diaspora. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001.
Fick, C. E. (1990). The making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue revolution from below. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
Frazier, E. E (1939). The Negro family in the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Geggus, D. P. (Ed.). (2001). The impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic world. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press.
Geggus, D. P. (2002). Haitian Revolutionary Studies. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Gilroy, P. (1993) The black Atlantic: Modernity and double consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Gomez, M. A. (1998). Exchanging our country marks: The transformation of African identities in the colonial and antebellum South. Chapel Hill, NC.: University of North Carolina Press.
Greenbaum, S. D. (2002). More than Black: Afro-Cubans in Tampa. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida.
Gutman, H. G. (1976). The Black family in slavery and freedom, 1750–1925. New York: Pantheon Books.
Hall, R. L. (1991). Savoring Africa in the New World. In H. J. Viola, & C. Margolis (Eds.), Seeds of change (pp. 160–171). Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Hanchard, M. G. (1994). Orpheus and power: The Movimento Negro of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, Brazil 1945–1988. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Hanchard, M. (Ed.) (1999). Racial politics in contemporary Brazil. Durham; NC: Duke University Press.
Harewood, J., & Henry, R. (1985). Inequality in a post-colonial society: Trinidad and Tobago. Port of Spain: Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies.
Henry, R. (1988). The state and income distribution in an independent Trinidad and Tobago. In S. Ryan (Ed.), Trinidad and Tobago: The independence experience 1962–1987 (pp. 471–493). Port of Spain: Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies.
Herskovits, M. J. (1941). The myth of the Negro past. New York: Harper and Brothers.
Hoberman, J. (1997). Darwin’s athletes: How sport has damaged Black America and preserved the myth of race. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Hoetink, H. (1973). Slavery and race relations in the Americas: An inquiry into their nature and nexus. New York: Harper and Row.
Holt, T. C. (1992). The problem of freedom: Race, labor, and politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Inikori, J. E. (1976a). Measuring the Atlantic slave trade: An assessment of Curtin and Anstey. Journal of African History, 17(2), 197–223.
Inikori, J. E. (1976b). Measuring the Atlantic slave trade: A rejoinder. Journal of African History, 17(4), 607–627.
Inikori, J. E. (2002). Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A study in international trade and economic development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Klein, H. S. (1999). The Atlantic slave trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Littlefield, D. C. (1981). Rice and slaves: Ethnicity and the slave trade in colonial South Carolina. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
Maingot, A. P. (1992). Race, color, and class in the Caribbean. In A. Stepan (Ed.), The Americas: Interpretive essays (pp. 220–247). New York: Oxford University Press.
Mann, K., & Bay, E. G. (Eds.). (2001). Rethinking the African diaspora: The making of a black Atlantic world in the Bight of Benin and Brazil. London: Frank Cass.
Matory, J. L. (1999). Afro-Atlantic culture: On the live dialogue between Africa and the Americas. In K. A. Appiah, & H. L. Gates, Jr. (Eds.), Africana: The encyclopedia of the African and African American experience (pp. 36–44). New York: Basic Civitas Books.
McWhorter, J. H. (2000). The missing Spanish Creoles: Recovering the birth of plantation contact languages. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Mintz, S. W. (1974). Caribbean transformations. Chicago: Aldine.
Mintz, S. W. (1985). Sweetness and power: The place of sugar in modem history. New York: Viking.
Mintz, S.W., & Price, R. (1992). The birth of African-American culture: An anthropological perspective. Boston: Beacon Press.
Monge Oviedo, R. (1992). Are we or aren’t we? Report on the Americas, 25(4), 19.
Moreau de Saint-Méry, M. L. E. (1958). Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie Française de l’isle de Saint-Domingue. Paris: Société de L’Historie des Colonies Françaises and Librarie LaRose. [Original work published 1797–1798.]
Morgan, M. H. (2002). Language, discourse and power in African American culture. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Mufwene, S. S. (Ed.). (1993). Africanisms in Afro-American language varieties. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.
Oostindie, G. (Ed.). (2001). Facing up to the past: Perspectives on the commemoration of slavery from Africa, the Americas and Europe. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle.
Pamphile, L. D. (2001). Haitians and African Americans: A heritage of tragedy and hope. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
Price, R. (Ed.). (1973). Maroon societies: Rebel slave communities in the Americas. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press.
Raboteau, A. J. (1978). Slave religion: The “invisible institution” in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press.
Rainwater, L., & Yancey, W. L. (1967). The Moynihan report and the politics of controversy. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.
Reichman, R. (Ed.). (1999). Race in contemporary Brazil: From indifference to inequality. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Reis, J. J. (1993). Slave rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim uprising of 1835 in Bahia. Trans. Arthur Brakel Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Roberts, W. A. (1942). The French in the West Indies. New York: Bobbs-Merrill.
Sansone, L. (2003). Blackness without ethnicity: Constructing race in Brazil. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Schuler, M. (1970). Akan slave revolts in the British Caribbean. Savacou, 1, 8–31.
Schuler, M. (1986). Recruitment of African indentured labourers for European colonies in the nineteenth century. In P. C. Emmer (Ed.), Colonialism and migration: Indentured labour before and after slavery (pp. 125–161). Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff.
Sheriff, R. E. (2001). Dreaming equality: Color, race, and racism in urban Brazil. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Simey, T. S. (1946). Welfare and planning in the West Indies. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Schuler, M. (1980). “Alas, alas, Kongo ”: A social history of indentured African immigration into Jamaica, 1841–1865. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Stephens, T. M. (1989). Dictionary of Latin American ethnic and racial terminology. Gainesville: University of Florida Press.
Sweet, J. H. (2003). Recreating Africa: Culture, kinship, and religion in the African-Portuguese world, 1441–1770. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
Tannenbaum, F. (1946). Slave and citizen: The Negro in the Americas. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Thornton, J. K. (1992). Africa and Africans in the making of the Atlantic world, 1400–1680. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Twine, F.W. (1998) Racism in a racial democracy: The maintenance of white supremacy in Brazil. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
U.S. Census Bureau. (2001). Current population survey. Annual social and economic supplement. Washington, DC: Author.
U.S. Census Bureau. (2002). Current population survey. Annual social and economic supplement. Washington, DC: Author.
U.S. Census Bureau. (2003). Current population survey. Annual social and economic supplement. Washington, DC: Author.
Williams, E. (1944). Capitalism and slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Wade, P. (1993). Blackness and race mixture: The dynamics of racial identity in Colombia. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Waters, M. C. (1999). Black identities: West Indian immigrant dreams and American realities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Whitten, N. E., Jr., & Torres, A. (Eds.). (1998). Blackness in Latin America and the Caribbean: Social dynamics and cultural transformations. 2 Vols. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Wood, P. H. (1974). Black majority: Negroes in colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono rebellion. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Yelvington, K. A. (2001a). Patterns of “race,” ethnicity, class, and nationalism. In R.S. Hillman (Ed.), Understanding contemporary Latin America, 2nd. ed. (pp. 229–261). Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publications.
Yelvington, K. A. (2001b). The Anthropology of Afro-Latin America and the Caribbean: Diasporic dimensions. Annual Review of Anthropology, 30, 227–260.
Yelvington, K. A. (Ed.). (forthcoming). Afro-Atlantic dialogues: Anthropology in the diaspora. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2005 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc.
About this entry
Cite this entry
Yelvington, K.A. (2005). African Diaspora in the Americas. In: Ember, M., Ember, C.R., Skoggard, I. (eds) Encyclopedia of Diasporas. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-29904-4_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-29904-4_3
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-0-306-48321-9
Online ISBN: 978-0-387-29904-4
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and Law