|
Title:
|
African Diasporas and the Atlantic |
|
Author:
|
Larson, Pier M. |
|
Abstract:
|
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. |
|
URI:
|
http://jhir.library.jhu.edu/handle/1774.2/32705
|
|
Date:
|
2007 |
|
Citation:
|
The Atlantic in Global History, 1500-2000, pp.129-147
|
|
Subject:
|
Africa, Diaspora, Ocean, Atlantic Ocean
African, Diasporas, Atlantic
|
