Africana Studies, Center for

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https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/handle/1774.2/32578

The Center for Africana Studies in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences pursues broad inquiry into the ideas and experiences of African peoples throughout the world. Its interdisciplinary approach is organized around three major sub-fields:

African studies
African-American studies
Studies of the African Diaspora

The Center's work spans diverse academic disciplines in the humanities, social sciences, and public health. While its sub-fields possess distinct and distinctive intellectual traditions, they offer exciting possibilities for comparative as well as integrative inquiry.

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Now showing 1 - 19 of 19

THE RACIAL PROFILE OF A RURAL MEXICAN
(The Americas, 2000) Vinson, Ben, III
Late colonial Mexico possessed one of the largest free-colored populations in Spanish America, numbering around 370,000 in 1793. The colony’s pardos, morenos, and mulattos were highly dispersed, being found throughout the major urban centers, coastal zones, rural areas, and in selected portions of the northern frontier. Studies conducted over the past two decades have assisted enormously in reconstructing the free-colored demographic profile, with particular emphasis on occupational and marriage patterns. Much of this research has resulted from sustained examinations of the caste vs. class debate, which has attempted to understand the manner in which the caste system worked in structuring colonial social relations.
Flushing Away Sentiment: Water Politics in The Custom of the Country
(Ellipses, 2000) Robbins, Hollis
Articulating Space: The Free-Colored Military Establishment in Colonial Mexico from the Conquest to Independence
(Callaloo, 2004) Vinson, Ben III
Introduction: Questioning the Question of Non-White Military Service in Colonial Mexico At the close of the seventeenth century, even with Spain feeling the heat of war and with streams of pirate raids still punishing the coastlines of the crown’s New World holdings, Spanish bureaucrats cringed when considering the prospect of using black troops to defend their possessions. Francisco de Seijas y Lobera, the former alcalde mayor (district governor) of Tacuba, a distinguished member of the Spanish gentry, a scientist, merchant, and a traveler, seemed to capture the spirit of the times in his fourteen-volume history of the Spanish kingdom. Written between 1702–1704 as a counseling guide for the new monarch, Philip V, Seijas dedicated an entire tome exclusively to Mexican affairs. Within, he described in detail the existing military landscape, the scope of enemy threats, the parameters of existing defenses, and most importantly, he offered a series of recommendations for improving the mechanisms for protecting the crown’s borders. During times of emergency, Seijas suggested that Mexico could probably count upon the military services of 200,000 coastal and frontier defenders. His estimates tallied that a full 175,000 of these would be drawn from the negro, mulatto, pardo, Indian, and mestizo racial classes. But in his enthusiasm for advocating the expansion of the military to include nonwhites, Seijas also revealed certain prejudices that seemed characteristic of his times. Sure, negros and mulattos (i.e. free-coloreds) could be called upon to serve; however, the terms of their service had to be constricted: With respect to the formation of the two companies, considering (as one should) that the said negros and mulatos cannot be allowed to use swords and daggers, sharp weapons, or firearms of any type . . . it is not convenient or safe for the service of the king that the tremendous number of negro and mulatto rabble that exist (sic) in the Indies use such weapons. This is because they could use these arms to revolt. Moreover, there is no just or political reason why these people, who are of the same species as slaves (being their offspring), should enjoy the same privileges (preeminencias) as Spaniards. For these reasons, and because [negros and mulattos] have already been involved in many uprisings and tumults in the Indies, it is best for the crown that free negros and mulattos not be permitted to use offensive or defensive weapons.1
Afro-Mexican History: Trends and Directions in Scholarship
(History Compass, 2005) Vinson, Ben, III
This article surveys the development of a relatively new and vibrant subfield in Latin American History, mapping out the major stages of its evolution and signaling key intellectual debates. While much of the scholarship on Afro-Mexican history has been produced in the last thirty-five years, this article aims to contextualize these writings within a broader historical framework. This process shows more clearly the various independent and interdependent tracks that exist within the study of Mexico’s black population.
ENSLAVED MALAGASY AND ‘LE TRAVAIL DE LA PAROLE' IN THE PRE-REVOLUTIONARY MASCARENES
(Journal of African History, 2007) Larson, Pier M.
ABSTRACT: Malagasy speakers probably formed the single largest native speech community among slaves dispersed into the western Indian Ocean between 1500 and 1900. In the eighteenth-century Mascarenes, Malagasy parlers (dialects) served as a contact language, understood both by persons born in Madagascar and by those with no direct ties to the island. Catholic missionaries working in Bourbon and I ˆ le de France frequently evangelized among sick and newly disembarked Malagasy slaves in their own tongues, employing servile interpreters and catechists from their ecclesiastical plantations as intermediaries in their ‘work of the word’. Evangelistic style was multilingual, in both French and Malagasy, and largely verbal, but was also informed by Malagasy vernacular manuscripts of Church doctrine set in Roman characters. The importance of Malagasy in the Mascarenes sets the linguistic environment of the islands off in distinctive ways from those of Atlantic slave societies and requires scholars to rethink the language and culture history of the western Indian Ocean islands,
African Diasporas and the Atlantic
(The Atlantic in Global History, 1500-2000, edited by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Eric R. Seeman, 129-147. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2007) Larson, Pier M.
As a cursory consultation of any library catalog quickly confirms, the African diaspora as both concept and field of study is overwhelmingly defined by Atlantic scholarship. This is paradoxical in two respects. The Atlantic is one of three broad regions of African dispersion outside the continent. Between 650 and 1900 C.E., a comparable number of sub-Saharan Africans left their homes for destinations in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean as they did into the Atlantic (see table 1).1Second,African diaspora, a relatively new concept, is widely thought to have been introduced into academic discourse through a conference paper delivered in 1965 by George Shepperson.2The conference in question united scholars of African history to consider intellectual problems in their fledgling field. It was held at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, a port on the Swahili coast of the Indian Ocean (map 1). From antiquity to the nineteenth century, Africans entered the Indian Ocean and its Red Sea extension as slaves from the continent’s eastern seaboard. First articulated at an African center of research and among scholars who taught about the departure of slaves into the Indian Ocean from their own shores, Shepperson’s notion of African diaspora found its intellectual home an ocean away, in Atlantic America.
The Problems and Challenges of Research and Writing on Africans and their Descendants in Colonial Cartagena de Indies:A Research Report
(Center for Africana Studies, 2007) Germeten, Nicole von
This paper is a work-in-progress summarizing the kinds of documents that can be used to learn about the history of Africans in colonial Cartagena de Indias. Some of the sources described here include the work of Alonso de Sandoval, a seventeenth-century Jesuit missionary who worked with African slaves, and documents related to the Cartagena leper colony. The paper's emphasis is on analysis of Afro-Cartagenan's testimonies given during the beatification process of Saint Peter Claver. These testimonies may offer a window into local African and Creole conceptions of heroism and miracles.
Colonies Lost: God, Hunger, and Conflict in Anosy (Madagascar) to 1674
(Variorum, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2007) Larson, Pier M.
A fleet of thirteen Portuguese vessels under the command of Pedro Álvares Cabral set sail from Lisbon for the East Indies just two years after Vasco da Gama fi rst rounded the Cape of Good Hope. In late May 1500, inclement weather at the Cape separated the vessel commanded by Diego Diaz from the others, blowing it well south of its intended course. Steering north to regain their way, Diaz and crew caught sight of land on 10 August along the coast of Anosy, Madagascar’s southeast extremity (fi g. 1). The day was the Feast of São Lourenço, and Diaz named the big island (Madagascar) for European cartography after the feast.1 As far as it is known, this was the fi rst sighting of Madagascar by seafarers hailing directly from the Atlantic via the Cape route. European sailors and mapmakers continued to identify Madagascar as São Lourenço (Portuguese) and Saint-Laurent (French) for centuries to come. From the early decades of the sixteenth century to the French abandonment of Madagascar in 1674, Anosy in southeast Madagascar was an important site of European-Malagasy interaction. The meeting grounds of Anosy played a signifi cant role in the early modern history of the southwest Indian Ocean, much as the Cape of Good Hope or Kilwa and Mombasa did, but they are poorly known outside a close circle of francophone Madagascar experts. At the same time little secondary literature on Anosy and its Europeans in any language is broad and comparative in outlook, setting them in wider and interconnected historical narratives of the region.2 ******************** 1. Alfred Grandidier, ed., Collection des ouvrages anciens concernant Madagascar, 9 vols. (Paris: Comité de Madagascar, 1903– 20), 1:3–5. 2. An exception is Mike Parker Pearson, “Close Encounters of the Worst Kind: Malagasy Resistance and Colonial Disasters in Southern Madagascar,” World Archaeology 28 (1997): 393–417. This work covers a broad set of encounters between Europeans and the inhabitants of southern Madagascar to the seventeenth century, mainly from an archaeological perspective. Anosy was one of several areas of European interest in Madagascar before the late seventeenth century, others being in the west, particularly the Bay of Boina and Saint Augustine Bay, which are not covered in this article. For these, see Pearson, “Close Encounters,” the articles by Vincent Belrose-Huyghues cited in later notes, and William Foster, “An English Settlement in Madagascar in 1645–6,” English Historical Review 27 (1912): 239–50.
Immigration, Race, and Nation: Baltimore's Immigrant Recruitment and Response, 1880-1910
(Center for Africana Studies, 2007) Shell-Weiss, Melanie
In the period immediately following the Civil War, Maryland was among the southern states to pursue an active campaign to recruit European immigrants. This paper explores these efforts as well as the response of residents already residing in the state, and strives to locate these initiatives within the broader context of race relations across the region.
Malagasy at the Mascarenes
(Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2007) Larson, Pier M.
European expansion from the fifteenth century produced much writing on, and sometimes in, non-European languages that served a broad array of imperial interests. Most European ventures into what one scholar has termed “colonial linguistics” were based on investigations among speakers of native tongues in the regions in which those speakers normally resided, twining language studies with observed “native” cultural qualities and setting out territories of colonial interest defined by local language and culture.1 Fewer colonial linguists ventured into plural societies to study the linguae francae of trade and labor that enabled communication across broad cultural and language differences, in part because such zones were considered dangerous and unstable, or lacking in mother tongues. Fewer still elected destinations of forced migration such as slave societies or freedmen’s towns and villages to examine the mother tongues of persons who had come coercively from afar, though many such settings in certain periods offered a rich menu of languages for study.2 1 Joseph Errington, “Colonial Linguistics,” Annual Review of Anthropology 30 (2001): 19–39. 2 Among the works of this nature are Alonso de Sandoval, Naturaleza policia sagrada y profana, costumbres y ritos, disciplina i cathecismo evange´lico de todos Etiopes (Sevilla, 1627); Sigismund Wilhelm Koelle, Polyglotta Africana: Or, a Comparative Vocabulary of Nearly Three Hundred Words and Phrases in More than One Hundred Distinct African Languages (London, 1854).
Atlantic Bridge, Atlantic Divide: Africans and Afro-Brazilians in Portuguese America
(Center for Africana Studies, 2007) Russell-Wood, John
This essay focuses on an aspect of persons of African birth and descent in colonial Brazil to which not sufficient attention has been paid by scholars. To the many factors-- ethnicity, language, belief systems slavery, manumission and the circumstance of having been born free,slave or manumitted, and belief systems, and behaviors, which led to differentiations among persons of African birth or descent in the colony—place of birth played a crucial role in distinguishing Africans from Afro-Brazilians. This essay will briefly review relations between African- born and Brazilian- born of African descent and then focus exclusively on the presence in Brazil of persons born in Africa. I posit the hypothesis that some continued to live in accordance with African principles and practices and consciously and intentionally resisted assimilation into Luso-African- Brazilian or even Afro-Brazilian communities.
Immigrants in Baltimore: How Warm the Welcome?
(Center for Africana Studies, 2007) Clifford, Elizabeth
Elizabeth Clifford, “Immigrants in Baltimore: How Warm the Welcome?” This paper focuses on the contemporary situation of immigrants in Baltimore. Immigrants in Baltimore face a situation different from those in many other cities in important ways. First, the immigrant population is incredibly diverse in Baltimore, and in Maryland more generally, with no one or two nationalities predominant, whereas in many cities the majority of immigrants are from one of a few origins. Second, in the early years of the 21st century, Baltimore’s growing immigrant population encountered a city in which the city government officially and warmly welcomed them, in an effort to stave off population decline, whereas in many cities local governments are hostile to immigrants. In this paper, I examine current demographics of immigrants in Baltimore, and examine the official response to this immigrant flow. This research draws from secondary analysis of Census data and government sources regarding the official city standpoint on immigration, as well as from fieldwork with an immigrant organization in the city. In addition, the author reflects on her experiences organizing and coordinating the Baltimore Immigration Summit, an annual event that brings together academics, service providers, activists, and others interested in the issue of immigration in Baltimore.
George Lamming the Existentialist
(Center for Africana Studies, 2008) Gordon, Lewis
This essay argues that George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin offers important tropes in black existential thought that are synchronous with Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, but with a more detailed exploration of the concept of political complicity through his portrait of the phenomenon of slime and its correlate, the slimy individual. The author also discusses Lamming’s treatment of the Fanonian motif of colonizing notions of normative development.
The Cultural Politics of Paul Robeson and Richard Wright: Theorizing the African Diaspora
(Center for Africana Studies, 2008) Hayes, Floyd, III
Confronted with the task of defining what it meant to be black in an anti-black world, early cultural critics faced intellectual, existential, and political challenges. This paper focuses on how Paul Robeson and Richard Wright met these challenges in the post-World War Two period. The author explores the way that Robeson and Wright’s biographies and writings shed light on the ambiguities inherent in theorizing the African Diaspora.
The Deliverance of Henry 'Box' Brown
(Center for Africana Studies, 2008) Robbins, Hollis
While The Narrative of Henry “Box” Brown has enjoyed a renewed interest in African American studies, few scholars have focused on the particular method of Brown’s escape from slavery to freedom—his overnight shipment by Adams Express from Richmond to Philadelphia—or the humor of his story. This paper argues that Brown’s initial celebrity is inextricably intertwined with public enthusiasm for rapid, reliable, and inexpensive mail delivery in antebellum America (notably in the abolitionist community) and with the daily comedy of the postman’s blindness to the contents of the mail.
Africa and Its Diasporas: Remembering South America
(Center for Africana Studies, 2008-08-21) Zeleza, Paul Tiyambe
African interest in the Diaspora has never been greater than it is now. This is evident in the growing attention paid to the subject by African scholars and governments. The motivations are as varied as they are complex. The ascendancy of globalization, transnational, and postcolonial studies has helped fuel African scholarly interest in Diaspora studies as has the rising tide of African international academic migrations since the 1980s (Zeleza 2004). The academic migrants are part of Africa’s new Diasporas, whose size is growing rapidly in parts of the global North, and which is coveted by African governments for their social capital—skills, knowledge, networks, civic awareness, cultural experience and cosmopolitanism—that can provide not only access to global markets and investment and stimulate technological innovation, but also invigorate democracy, strengthen civil society and encourage the growth of new philanthropic cultures. Already, the new Diaspora is Africa’s biggest donor; not surprisingly governments increasingly regard it as a critical remittance pipeline, as an important economic asset.
Charting Racial Formations in the New U.S. South: Reflections on North Carolina’s Latino, African-American, and Afro-Latino Relations
(2008-09-11T13:28:38Z) Vinson, Ben III; Vaughn, Bobby; Tovares, Carlos; Sartorius, David; Jackson, John Jr.
The term “New South” has been used for over a hundred years to describe and categorize the Southern U.S. The desire to continually reinvent the South suggests that the current transformations of the region’s economy, demographics, and politics are not radical reconfigurations of a monolithic and unchanging landscape, but rather are the latest articulations of a complex and continually evolving region. Change in the South, however, is not a neutral, uncontested process. The South’s meaning is now being challenged in ways that have not been witnessed before. Multiethnic diversity has been identified as one of the key emerging features of the region, particularly in job-laden metropolitan areas. In North Carolina and other Southern States, migration streams are channeling Latinos into areas with relatively large Black populations, and in geographically defined social/political spaces that have been historically discussed in binary terms of Black and White. This essay is a preliminary exploration of these processes of contested change in North Carolina, examining the stakes involved, the processes that have unfurled, and the histories/legacies produced by these interactions that are rapidly becoming prominent features in the American social landscape.
Race and Class in Colonial Mexico: An Overview of the Literature
(2009-12-03T17:12:20Z) Gilles, Kristin
My paper evaluates historiography in colonial Mexican history, focusing on the specific contributions scholars have made in the discussion of the role of race and class within colonial Mexican society. Looking at identity construction and social stratification, one group of scholars argue that race is more important in the operation of these two social processes; while other scholars argue that class is more important. However, there is a third group of scholars within the debate who have taken unique positions. These historians, all who are writing more recent scholarship, move the debate forward, offering alternative explanations for the processes of identity construction and social ranking beyond the traditional race or class explanation. The debate becomes much more complex with the introduction of patriarchialism, gender, different social spaces, or the idea of social race. My paper proposes that patriarchy and social race, defined by shared experiences, were the most important determinants of identity construction and social stratification.
"We are Seven" and the First British Census
(English Language Notes, 2010) Robbins, Hollis

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