Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South - Softcover

Gomez, Michael A.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807846945 ISBN 13: 9780807846940

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998

Synopsis

The transatlantic slave trade brought individuals from diverse African regions and cultures to a common destiny in the American South. In this comprehensive study, Michael Gomez establishes tangible links between the African American community and its African origins and traces the process by which African populations exchanged their distinct ethnic identities for one
defined primarily by the conception of race. He examines transformations in the politics, social structures, and religions of slave populations through 1830, by which time the contours of a new African American identity had begun to emerge.

After discussing specific ethnic groups in Africa, Gomez follows their movement to North America, where they tended to be amassed in recognizable concentrations within individual colonies (and, later, states). For this reason, he argues, it is possible to identify particular ethnic cultural influences and ensuing social formations that heretofore have been considered unrecoverable. Using sources pertaining to the African continent
as well as runaway slave advertisements, ex-slave narratives, and folklore, Gomez reveals concrete and specific links between particular African populations and their North American progeny, thereby shedding new light on subsequent African American social formation.

About this title

Review

With its legacy of brutality and of the horrific overseas passage, the transatlantic slave trade may be imagined as the kidnapping of Africans without regard to nationality or ethnicity. Based on his research, however, Michael A. Gomez suggests that Africans, upon arriving in America, were dispersed much more closely along ethnic and cultural lines than previously acknowledged. The underlying theme of his provocative work, Exchanging Our Country Marks, is that while blacks eventually replaced their African ethnic identities with new racial ones after arriving in the American South, they retained much of their original cultures far longer than was originally suspected. Some of his most interesting evidence of this comes in the form of runaway-slave advertisements, which identified the slaves by their ethnic roots ("Dinah, an Ebo wench that speaks very good English"). By scrutinizing ex-slave narratives, stories, music, and even the location and nature of slave rebellions, Gomez pieces together a genealogy of blacks in the American South, attempting to examine their notions of identity. Of course, much is based on significant speculation, a fact that only underscores the difficulty of such scholarship. Gomez manages to present a wide range of information clearly as he expands on a wealth of recent research regarding the slave trade and the history of blacks in America, making Exchanging Our Country Marks a vast and creative exploration of African identity in the United States from 1526 to 1830.

Book Description

"Every so often an essentially synthetic work appears that is more than a synthesis. Exchanging Our Country Marks by Michael A. Gomez is such a book. Although it relies heavily on secondary sources reinforced by extensive research in runaway slave advertisements in southern newspapers and WPA interviews from the 1930s, Exchanging Our Country Marks is a conceptual tour de force. No brief review can do justice to the nuances and complexities of Gomez's argument. . . . A fully satisfying work that engages the heart as well as the mind."-- Southern Cultures

Edition details

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0807846945
• ISBN 13: 9780807846940
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 384