Reflections on the Scholarship of African Origins and Influence in American Slavery
| Autor: | P. Sterling Stuckey |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2006 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | The Journal of African American History. 91:425-443 |
| ISSN: | 2153-5086 1548-1867 |
| DOI: | 10.1086/jaahv91n4p425 |
| Popis: | Ye dark-skinned peoples, listen to me: Our fathers did not play about with names. To hear their names is to know their origin, Every name a veritable testament! Tobosun Sowande, Black Lines, 1970-72 Some three years ago, at an Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD) conference at Northwestern University, Michael A. Gomez, chair of the History Department at New York University, proposed a tribute to me in honor of my retirement. He indicated that he and Robert A. Hill, who is Editor-in-Chief of the Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Papers at the University of California, Los Angeles, might organize a conference. Completely unexpected, the suggestion was entirely to my liking. I suggested that David Roediger, Professor of History at the University of Illinois and a former student of mine at Northwestern, be added to the organizing committee. So influential historians from three universities were to do the planning, which was a singular honor for me. With a host of my colleagues and former students in attendance, the conference was the greatest tribute that I have experienced in my life. I can say that I have had my honors. Knowing what to write about on this occasion for this journal, with its unequaled standing in the field, was somewhat perplexing. Professor Hill's suggestion that I use the opportunity to reflect on the current state of scholarship on slavery appealed to me because for decades much of my own work, when crossing and intersecting disciplines, has been devoted to that subject. In addition, the fact that I might raise again an aspect of slavery that has been persistently avoided by almost all students of the subject--the clash of cultures that took place in American slavery--was an added incentive to take up that subject. When I received three papers from the conference that also treat the subject of African origins and influences in slave culture, I decided that "Reflections on the Scholarship of African Origins and Influence in American Slavery" would be the subject of my essay. In a sense, the students of slavery taken up in my essay, with the exception of Eugene Genovese, have so much in common that they practically selected themselves. The avoidance of processes of cultural interaction is of great importance because some historians propound, and others assume without comparative analysis, the cultural superiority of Europeans and Americans who enslaved Africans in America. To be sure, the matter is such a closed one for them that an assumption of master class superiority is, sadly, the reigning view. In effect, the topic has not been up for discussion. The relationships between slave art, labor, and religion have been given short shrift, without discussion of how art of any kind relates to the "labor" and "religion" of the slave master. AFRICANS AS "CROWDS" AND "CREOLES" Sidney Mintz's published work on these questions in The Birth of Afro-American Culture, is emblematic of the scholarship of avoidance to which I refer. Having published nothing of consequence on slave art or religion in North America, Mintz and his co-author Richard Price declare themselves experts on slave culture in this country, but not in any comprehensible way. They attempt to demonstrate the level of their expertise by no more than the expedient of changing the title of their earlier study, which was not devoted to slavery in this country. What was originally An Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American Past: A Caribbean Perspective was changed to The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective. (1) The new publication is, in their words, the "original essay largely unchanged," and they add that they have "updated a handful of references, mainly to our own work; we have in a few cases modified terminology to keep step with current norms; and we have made minor stylistic alterations." (2) Setting themselves against the Black Studies movement made possible by the civil rights ferment of the 1960s, these two scholars explain: "If we seem to underemphasize the African past to stress the motile nature of Afro-America, it is in part because the usual emphasis seems to have been the reverse. … |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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