Dear Colleagues:

It is with much happiness that I return from a conference trip to find a new book by Paul Lovejoy to add to his already impressive list of publications.  The book, Slavery in the Global Diaspora of Africa, is published by Routledge.  The details are below.  Please join me in congratulating Paul on his latest accomplishment.

Thabit

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Summary

The collective significance of the themes that are explored in Slavery in the Global Diaspora of Africa bridge the Atlantic and thereby provide insights into historical debates that address the ways in which parts of Africa fitted into the modern world that emerged in the Atlantic basin.

The study explores the conceptual problems of studying slavery in Africa and the broader Atlantic world from a perspective that focuses on Africa and the historical context that accounts for this influence. Paul Lovejoy focuses on the parameters of the enforced migration of enslaved Africans, including the impact on civilian populations in Africa, constraints on migration, and the importance of women and children in the movement of people who were enslaved. The prevalence of slavery in Africa and the transformations of social and political formations of societies and political structures during the era of trans-Atlantic migration inform the book’s research. The analysis places Africa, specifically western Africa, at the center of historical change, not on the frontier or periphery of western Europe or the Americas, and provides a global perspective that reconsiders historical reconstruction of the Atlantic world that challenges the distortions of Eurocentrism and national histories.

Slavery in the Global Diaspora of Africa will be of interest to scholars and students of colonial history, African history, Diaspora Studies, the Black Atlantic and the history of slavery.

Contents

Part 1: Issues of Enslavement

1. Ethnicity, Culture and Religion in Global Africa
2. Experiences of the Enslaved in Africa
3. Regulation and Patterns in Collaboration in the Slave Trade

Part 2: Enforced Migration

4. Pawnship, Slavery and Freedom
5. Concubinage, Polygyny, and the Status of Women
6. Children of the Slave Trade
7. Enslaved Muslims from the Central Sudan

Part 3: Life Stories of Enslavement

8. Transatlantic Transformations in Identities
9. Freedom Narratives of Trans-Atlantic Slavery
10. The Odyssey of Catherine Mulgrave Zimmerman

Part 4: Identity and Diaspora in Global Africa

11. Situating Identities: Methodology through the Ethnic Lens
12. Scarification and the Loss of History in the African Diaspora
13. Enslaved Africans and their Expectations of Slave Life in the Americas

Conclusion:  Reflections on the Study of Slavery