The African Diaspora Archaeology Network (ADAN) welcomes Christopher Barton as a new co-editor of the quarterly Newsletter. Chris' research and public engagement work includes 19th century African American communities. He provides a brief introduction concerning his interests --

"I am a doctoral student at Temple University, studying under David G. Orr. The work for my dissertation focuses on Timbuctoo, an African American community in southern New Jersey (1820 to the present). At Timbuctoo, I am exploring the archaeology of race and archaeology as social activism. My major influences have included Chris Fennell, Mark Leone, Barbara Little, Christopher Matthews, Paul Mullins, Charles Orser, Robert Schuyler, and Paul Shackel. In the future, I would like to see archaeology become much more democratic and relevant to the present-day; it is because of this vision that I am extremely excited to be a part of the Newsletter. Thank you."

We also extend our continuing gratitude to John McCarthy, who serves as the book review editor for the Newsletter.

Dr. LaRoche has been selected to receive the 2011 John L. Cotter Award in Historical Archaeology for outstanding scholarly achievement based on her remarkable work in expanding interdisciplinary developments of historical archaeology in examinations of African American history. She is a lecturer, public speaker, consultant, researcher, and professor who crosses several disciplines in her investigations of the African diaspora. LaRoche's work has had a profound effect through intellectual enhancement of research designs implemented within our profession and through her political and educational outreach to governmental and public audiences. She has excelled in expanding the knowledge of public and governmental audiences in the methods of archaeological and historical analysis of African American heritage. LaRoche has also worked ceaselessly to enhance the preservation and understanding of related archaeological sites.

LaRoche has been a powerful voice within archaeology to encourage researchers focusing on the African diaspora to be as knowledgeable of the intellectual heritage of African American scholars, such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Frederick Douglass, as they are of archaeological methods and theory. Among other works, her co-authored article with Michael Blakey, "Seizing Intellectual Power: The Dialogue at the New York African Burial Ground," Historical Archaeology 31(3): 84-106 (1997), has been widely cited across disciplines and discussed extensively by her peers within historical archaeology who seek to implement her recommended framework for research projects and civic engagement. Through such works, LaRoche has significantly enhanced the way historical archaeologists approach African American sites through interdisciplinary methods and through ethically-engaged collaborations with stakeholder communities.

By incorporating cultural landscape analysis in her most recent work, LaRoche has extended her interdisciplinary reach once again. For example, in "The 'Balance Principle': Slavery, Freedom, and the Formation of the Nation," in Cabin, Quarter, Plantation: Architecture and Landscapes of North American Slavery, edited by Clifton Ellis and Rebecca Ginsburg, pp. 233-62 (Yale University Press, 2010), she examines the intersections of legal history, the contours of slavery and racism, and the development of escape routes and strategies of resistance. Her analysis serves to enhance historical archaeologists' understanding of the larger geographic contexts of African American sites and trajectories of movement across the landscape. Similarly, LaRoche's pioneering dissertation from the University of Maryland in 2004 combined research in archaeology, free Black communities, and insights into the achievements of African Americans in aiding one another to attain freedom through the "Underground Railroad." Her work provides a framework for archaeologists grappling with this nebulous, clandestine history. LaRoche's research into slavery and the constitution, the fugitive slave law, and the resistance of enslaved women grew out of her dissertation, and we can look forward to future expansions of these interdisciplinary studies and insights from this exceptional scholar. She has also exposed young scholars to archaeological precepts in university classes, providing course instruction in the History department at Georgetown University and in the American Studies department at the University of Maryland, College Park.

LaRoche has provided invaluable consulting services for a number of archaeological projects focused on African diaspora histories. She has worked extensively with the public and with her colleagues inside and outside the profession as a steward for neglected, forgotten, or threatened archaeological resources. LaRoche served as an archaeological conservator for the African Burial Ground Project in New York City and has worked tirelessly to inform archaeologists about the importance of related issues in artifact conservation. Among her on-going efforts are educational outreach and consulting services for the National Park Service, Boston's African Meeting House, the University of Massachusetts, Boston, the City of Philadelphia, and the Duffield Street Project in New York City. She served on the "Preserve America Summit" panel and was an adviser and participant for the African American National Historic Landmark Assessment Survey. As one of the authors of the "National Significance of the Harriet Tubman Historic Area," LaRoche applied a cultural landscape assessment in that project for the National Park Service. In addition, she has provided guidance and direction for the public interpretation at the President's House site in Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia.

In 2006 and again in 2010, Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley announced LaRoche's appointment to the African American Museum Corporation Board of Directors. She currently serves as Vice Chair of the Commission on African American History and Culture and is a newly appointed board member of the Reginald F. Lewis Museum. Most recently, LaRoche was instrumental in shaping Maryland legislation which provides capital funds to help preserve and protect African American heritage sites. She has also worked as a historical and archaeological consultant for the National Forest Service, Shawnee National Forest Service, and the Joseph Holston Underground Railroad Art Project.

Dr. LaRoche has made exceptional contributions to historical archaeology and its related disciplines and has embarked, as a recent doctoral recipient, in a career of scholarly excellence. She has significantly enhanced the quality of historical archaeologists' approaches to research projects and of governmental and public audiences' understanding of archaeologists' contributions to commemorating and preserving African American heritage. Akin Ogundiran, Professor and Chair of the Africana Studies Department, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, will present the John L. Cotter Award to Dr. LaRoche at the Society for Historical Archaeology's conference banquet in Austin, Texas, on January 7, 2011.

Washington, DC -- The Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) has awarded the 2010 Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities to Dr. Christopher C. Fennell, Associate Professor, Associate Head & Director of Graduate Studies, Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The awards ceremony was held during the CGS 50th Annual Meeting.

Created in 1971, the Arlt Award honors the first president of CGS and is given annually to a young scholar-teacher who has written a book deemed to have made an outstanding contribution to scholarship in the humanities. Dr. Fennell becomes the award's 39th recipient for Crossroads and Cosmologies: Diasporas and Ethnogenesis in the New World (University Press of Florida, 2007). He received a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Virginia in 2003.

Crossroads and Cosmologies has been hailed as "a powerful interpretative framework within which to posit how new cultural identities were formed from the interactions of different cultural groups" by the Journal of Middle Atlantic Archaeology; it examines the way different cultures retained their religious artifacts and symbols as they moved from Europe and Africa to North America, the Caribbean, and South America. Theresa Singleton of Syracuse University called it "an intriguing analysis of religious artifacts that provides an innovative conceptual framework and methodology for the archaeological study of diasporas" saying it "greatly advances our understanding of cultural creativity over simplistic notions of creolization."

The Council of Graduate Schools is an organization of over 500 institutions of higher education in the United States and Canada engaged in graduate education, research, and the preparation of candidates for advanced degrees.

This year's finalists were selected from a field of nearly 100 entries by a jury of scholars that included Edward Ball (independent author), Jeffrey Ferguson (Amherst College), and Martha Hodes (New York University). "In the Shadow of Slavery tells the fascinating story of how enslaved Africans shaped and changed the landscape of the New World," says Hodes, the 2010 Douglass Prize Jury Chair and Professor of History at New York University. "With remarkable originality, the authors reveal how the men and women of the Middle Passage wielded their agricultural experience as part of the unending struggle to control their own lives. Interpreting archival evidence with both rigor and creativity, Carney and Rosomoff explore the provisioning of slave ships, the transfer and diffusion of African horticultural knowledge, the botanical gardens of slaves, and the gastronomic legacies of black slavery, among many other intriguing topics. Comprehensive and compelling, this is a work of truly global dimensions that narrates the ordeal of enslavement as a simultaneous story of food, memory, and survival."

The Frederick Douglass Book Prize was established in 1999 to stimulate scholarship in the field of slavery and abolition by honoring outstanding books. Previous winners were Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan in 1999; David Eltis, 2000; David Blight, 2001; Robert Harms and John Stauffer, 2002; James F. Brooks and Seymour Drescher, 2003; Jean Fagan Yellin, 2004; Laurent Dubois, 2005; Rebecca J. Scott, 2006; Christopher Leslie Brown, 2007; Stephanie E. Smallwood, 2008; and Annette Gordon-Reed, 2009. The award is named for Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), the slave who escaped bondage to emerge as one of the great American abolitionists, reformers, writers, and orators of the 19th century.

The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, a part of The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University, was established in November 1998 through a generous donation by Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. Its mission is to promote the study of all aspects of slavery, especially the chattel slave system and its destruction. The Center seeks to foster an improved understanding of the role of slavery, slave resistance, and abolition in the founding of the modern world by promoting interaction and exchange between scholars, teachers, and public historians through publications, educational outreach, and other programs and events.

According to the National Science Foundation, in 2009 there were 2,221 African Americans who earned doctoral degrees from U.S. universities. This was the highest number of doctorates awarded to blacks in any single year. African-American doctoral awards increased by a healthy 10.1 percent from 2008 to 2009. Since 2005, black doctoral awards are up by 23.5 percent.

African Americans won 4.5 percent of all doctorates awarded in the United States last year. If we exclude foreign students, we find that African Americans made up 6.9 percent of all U.S. citizens or permanent U.S. residents who earned doctorates.

Blacks earned 947 Ph.D.s in scientific fields, up from 825 in 2008, an increase of nearly 15 percent. Another 1,274 African Americans earned doctorates in non-scientific fields. Many of these doctorates were in the field of education.

Racism and xenophobia still ravage contemporary society and no state is immune to their effects, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, Githu Muigai, said today.

"Racism and xenophobia are not yesterday's problems; they remain an immense challenge for today," Mr. Muigai said while presenting two reports to the UN General Assembly.

"Be it the member of an ethnic minority who is attacked or killed in the context of a conflict due to his or her minority status; the individual subjected to stop and searches, interrogations or arrests, solely because of his or her perceived religious or ethnic background; the migrant, the refugee or asylum-seeker who faces daily discrimination due to his or her status as a non-citizen; or the football player who is insulted because of his skin colour -- all these people unfortunately demonstrate the validity of my statement," he said.

Mr Muigai noted that no state is immune to extremist political parties, movements and groups, and warned that racism may lead to genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.

"Relying on the dehumanization of the other, hate speech may indeed become an effective tool in times of conflict to incite people to commit acts of violence, including killings, against specific individuals or groups of individuals," he said.

The Special Rapporteur warned in particular against "deeply marked tendencies to characterize migration as a problem and threat to social cohesion."

"Migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers, regardless of their migration status, are entitled to have all their human rights protected by the State where they live without discrimination," Muigai said. He urged States to ensure that migration policies are "at all times consistent with international human rights instruments."

He called on states to be vigilant against extremist groups and to condemn and outlaw organizations and activities that promote or incite racial discrimination. He noted, however, that fighting racism requires more than the enactment of anti-discrimination laws.

"Overcoming racism also requires addressing public and private attitudes which justify and perpetuate racism at all levels and in all areas of life," he said.

On the question of incitement to racial or religious hatred, Muigai stressed that "vigorously interrogating and criticizing religious doctrines and their teachings is thoroughly legitimate and constitutes a significant part of the exercise of the right to freedom of expression and freedom of religion."

But he expressed concern about discrimination against individuals on the basis of their religion or belief; attacks on religious sites; religious and ethnic profiling; and negative stereotyping of religions, their followers, sacred persons, and symbols.

Mr. Muigai is a lawyer specialized in international human rights law. He was appointed by the Human Rights Council as a Special Rapporteur – reporting to that body as an unpaid, independent expert -- beginning August 2008.

As the United Nations system gears up to celebrate 2011 as the International Year for People of African Descent, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon delivered an impassioned plea today to the world community to eradicate racism once and for all.

"The international community cannot accept that whole communities are marginalized because of the colour of their skin," he told an event at UN Headquarters in New York to launch the Year. "People of African descent are among those most affected by racism. Too often, they face denial of basic rights such as access to quality health services and education. Such fundamental wrongs have a long and terrible history.

"The international community has affirmed that the transatlantic slave trade was an appalling tragedy not only because of its barbarism but also because of its magnitude, organized nature and negation of the essential humanity of the victims."

"Even today, Africans and people of African descent continue to suffer the consequences of these acts," he added, calling for their full integration into social, economic and political life and at all levels of decision-making.

The General Assembly proclaimed the Year in December 2009 in a resolution citing the need to strengthen national actions and regional and international cooperation to ensure that people of African descent fully enjoy economic, cultural, social, civil and political rights, to advance their integration into all political, economic, social and cultural aspects of society, and to promote a greater knowledge of and respect for their diverse heritage and culture.

"As the Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirms, 'all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights,'" Mr. Ban said. "If we are to make those words real, then we must eradicate racism once and for all. The success of the International Year requires concerted efforts across the United Nations system and at the regional and national levels, with the widest possible engagement and participation."

Also addressing the event was the Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights, Ivan Simonovic, who said the International Year offers a unique opportunity to redouble efforts to fight racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance that affect Afro-descendents in all parts of the world.

"The International Year must become a milestone in the ongoing campaign to advance the rights of people of African descent and it deserves to be accompanied by activities that fire the imagination, enhance our understanding of the situation of people of African descent and are a catalyst for real and positive change in the daily lives of the millions of Afro-descendents around the world," he told the gathering.

The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record, www.slaveryimages.org. This a searchable collection of 1,275 images continues to be revised and corrected on a regular basis. Since the last up-date report in August 2007, corrections and modifications have been made to already existing entries, but new images have been added, particularly on the Caribbean, U.S. South and West Africa in the nineteenth century.

The latter include 22 unique, unpublished drawings and watercolors of social life, settlements, and material culture along West African coastal areas, particularly Liberia and what is today Equatorial Guinea (Corisco Island). These materials are held by the Department of Special Collections of the University of Virginia Library (see www.slaveryimages.org image references UVA01 and following).

The compilers particularly request assistance in identifying the provenience and content of these drawings, as they continue to welcome more generally any suggestions for corrections or modifications to the current bibliographic and historical information. They appreciate hearing from persons with specialist knowledge of any of the images. Such persons, from a variety of fields in a number of countries, have helped to improve information in the entries, thus enhancing the site's value as a research and teaching tool. The website continues to be widely used; for example, from 4 Feb. 2007 to 25 Oct. 2010, the site has been accessed by over 515,000 "unique visitors." Comments can be addressed to Jerry Handler at jh3v@virginia.edu.

George Washington was born into a world where slavery was an accepted part of life. When his father died in 1743, Washington -- at the age of 11 -- inherited 10 slaves.

When the nation's first president died in 1799, more than 300 slaves lived in quarters on his Mount Vernon estate. This year, those slave quarters, first opened to the public in 1962, went through an extensive archaeological analysis and restoration.

These refurbished quarters shed new light on the story of the slaves who lived and worked at Mount Vernon.

The renovated quarters are two one-story wings added to the Mount Vernon greenhouse shortly after Washington became president. Each one is divided into two small workrooms, and two sleeping areas, one for men and another for women. Most of Washington's married slaves did not live in the same household as their spouses. Each room had a fireplace and was accessed by a single doorway.

"We have a lot of archaeological materials that we excavated from the slave quarter site," Archeologist Dennis Pogue says. "And from that, we know the kinds of things that they were actually using; the ceramics that they were eating from, the food remains. We found a lot of animal bones, so we know that they were eating lots and lots of wild animals -- that they were augmenting the rations that they were getting from the Washington's."

Pogue says documents written by George Washington, his family and white employees, and other plantation owners provided information about the quarters and the slaves who lived there.

"I mean we have some descriptions of what these quarters look like and they describe them as huts and they say 'They are more miserable than anything that you can imagine,'" Pogue says. "We don't want to whitewash this part of the story. These folks were owned by other people. They had no rights of their own and they were doing hard work."

The actual restoration of the site took almost 10 months. In addition to restoring the living quarters, clothing, tools, furniture, cookware, toys and personal accessories used by the slaves were reproduced. These items help bring to life the living conditions and experiences of the maids, cooks, servants, skilled craftsmen and laborers who worked on the five farms that made up the Mount Vernon property.

The renovated quarters include two one-story structures added at Mount Vernon shortly after George Washington became president. "It's a culmination of over 20 years of research. So it's wonderful to see this brought to the public's attention," he adds.

A number of descendants of George Washington's slaves attended the opening celebration of the restored quarters. Among them was Rohulamin Quander, a senior administrative judge in Washington, D.C. and founder of the Quander Historical Society.

"Sukey Bay was an 18th century Quander ancestor who lived at the River Farm," Quander says. "She had several children: Nancy Carter Quander and Rose, both were Sukey Bay's daughters. Nancy was a spinner. She lived up to 1850s. We have records for her working around in landscaping right here at Mount Vernon and other Quander family ancestors worked here. We have a long history of involuntary and presumably uncompensated servitude."

Last summer, the Quanders celebrated their 85th family reunion at Mount Vernon. Quander says renovating the slave quarters is a significant gesture of recognition for the hundreds of enslaved African Americans -- men and women -- who lived there.

"For many years, their names were forgotten,Quander adds. "The roles that they had played were forgotten. If the man they worked for, George Washington, is glorified, we want to give these men and women their just due because they were the ones who toiled from sunup to sundown, six to seven days a week, who made it possible for him to go off to do many, many great things that benefited all of us."

The chance to see what life was like for slaves by visiting the renovated slave quarters is a great opportunity for teachers like Beth Cayer. She's brought her 5th grade students on a field trip to Mount Vernon as part of their history class.

"It's beautiful. I hadn't seen it last year, so I was really excited for the kids to see it this year, because we've done a big unit about colonial America and we did a 4-day-lesson on slavery," Crayer says. "So it was a real eye-opener to a lot of the kids, the conditions that they lived in here. Of course some of the kids have the ancestors that came over that way. So it was a real eye-opener for them to see the contrast in life styles. It made a real impression on them."

Giving visitors a better understanding of the nature and harshness of slavery was one of the reasons for restoring the buildings. The point was not lost on Gloria Alice Holmes, another of Sukey Bay's descendants who came to Mount Vernon for the dedication ceremony.

"It's raining today," Holmes says. "I'd like to say in my opinion, the rain- that's the tears of the slaves saying thank you, thank you for not forgetting us."

Mount Vernon officials expect more than one million visitors to tour the restored slave quarters next year.

After more than eight years of street demonstrations, arguments, haggling, and missed deadlines; after unprecedented public debate about the impact of slavery on life in Philadelphia and the United States and on the life and moral character of George Washington; after thousands of news articles, feature stories, and TV and radio programs, the site marking the intertwined lives of presidents and slaves is set to open to the public with a simple ribbon-cutting at noon Wednesday.

It may be snowing or raining. It may be bitterly cold. The public may be distracted by the holidays. President Obama will not be there on Independence Mall. No matter.

"President's House: Freedom and Slavery in Making a New Nation" is done, and project managers say that given all the talk, sweat, and sometimes-rancorous disagreement that have gone into it, what's done should be open and seen.

"It's either the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end," said Randall Miller, a professor of American history at St. Joseph's University who has been involved for the whole length of the winding, bumpy road leading to the doorway of the President's House.

"Finally, the public will get to weigh in," he said, on whether the memorial has found the right balance in evoking two presidents and commemorating nine slaves.

Clay Armbrister, Mayor Nutter's chief of staff, called the site virtually iconic at birth.

Not only does it define the small piece of ground at Sixth and Market Streets where Presidents Washington and John Adams lived, but it focuses on the enslaved Africans held by Washington at the house, which was largely demolished in 1832.

Behind the site, a few feet from the Liberty Bell Center's entrance, an enclosure of glass, wood, and steel commemorates the nine.

"The installation in and of itself will do what educational exhibitions are meant to do -- provoke thought and debate -- and I think there will be a lot of thought and debate," Armbrister said.

Cynthia MacLeod, superintendent of Independence National Historical Park, acknowledged that mid-December was not the best time to open, but "to have it finished and not bring some attention to that would be unfortunate," she said.

"The exhibit really brings to the fore this dichotomy in our country of freedom and slavery," MacLeod said. "The Declaration of Independence at that time did not mean everyone. It took the Civil War to abolish slavery, and the civil-rights movement of the 1960s to make civil rights more of a reality in addition to freedom." [Read the full article online at the Philadelphia Inquirer web site.]

New Book

Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade
By David Eltis and David Richardson
Yale University Press, Hardcover
336 pp., ISBN-13: 978-0300124606, 2010.

Description from the Publisher:

New Book

Challenge of Culture in Africa: From Restoration to Integration
By Bernard Nsokika Fonlon
Langaa RPCIG, Cameroon, Paperback
96 pp., ISBN-13: 978-9956578986, 2010.

Description from the Publisher:

New Book

Mississippi in Africa: The Saga of the Slaves of
Prospect Hill Plantation and Their Legacy in Liberia Today
By Alan Huffman
University Press of Mississippi, Paperback
336 pp., ISBN-13: 978-160473753, 2010.

Description from the Publisher:

New Book

World of a Slave: Encyclopedia of the
Material Life of Slaves in the United States
Edited by Martha B. Katz-Hyman and Kym S. Rice
ABC-CLIO/Greenwood Press, Hardcover (two volumes)
700 pp., ISBN-13: 978-031334942, 2010.

Description from the Publisher:

New Book

Archaeology of Louisiana
Edited by Mark A. Rees
Louisiana State University Press, Hardcover
512 pp., ISBN-13: 978-0807137031, 2010.

Description from the Publisher:

New Book

New Philadelphia: An Archaeology of Race in the Heartland
By Paul A. Shackel
University of California Press, Paperback
240 pp., ISBN-13: 978-0520266308, 2010.

Description from the Publisher:

New Book

A Slaveholders' Union: Slavery, Politics,
and the Constitution in the Early American Republic
By George W. Van Cleve
University of Chicago Press, Hardcover
388 pp., ISBN-13: 978-0226846682, 2010.

Description from the Publisher:

New Book

Race and Slavery in the Middle East:
Histories of Trans-Saharan Africans in
Nineteenth-Century Egypt, Sudan, and the Ottoman Empire
Edited by Terence Walz and Kenneth M. Cuno
American University in Cairo Press, Hardcover
256 pp., ISBN-13: 978-9774163982, 2010.

Description from the Publisher:

New Book

The Warmth of Other Suns:
The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
By Isabel Wilkerson
Random House, Hardcover
622 pp., ISBN-13: 978-0679444329, 2010.

Description from the Publisher:

New Report

The Ceramics Assemblage from the Kingsley Plantation Slave Quarters
By Karen McIlvoy
National Park Service, online report
URL http://www.nps.gov/archeology/sites/
npSites/kingsleyCeramics.htm, 2010.

Description from the Publisher:

The Annual SHA Conference on Historical and Underwater Archaeology will be held at the Hilton Austin Hotel, in downtown Austin. Located in the heart of Texas, Austin is an exciting and dynamic city. It is made up of a diverse blend of cultures that can be experienced through everything from music and dining to architecture, art, and history. This is all in keeping with the conference theme for 2011, Boundaries and Crossroads in Action: Global Perspectives in Historical Archaeology. Additional details on the conference are available online at http://www.sha.org/about/conferences/2011.cfm.

The annual forum of the African Diaspora Archaeology Network (ADAN) will be convened on Friday, Jan. 7, 2011, from 9am to 12pm in Grand Ballroom F of the Hilton Austin conference center, and is entitled African Histories and Diasporas: A Conversation with Robert Farris Thompson.

Bob Thompson is Col. John Trumbull Professor of History of Art at Yale University. For over 50 years, he has studied aspects of African diasporas through field research on both sides of the Atlantic. A sampling of his work includes: Black Gods and Kings; African Art in Motion; Face of the Gods; and Tango: The Art History of Love. His foundational reader, Flash of the Spirit, discusses West African influences on contemporary Afro-Caribbean populations, as manifested in material culture, philosophies, and performance. Thompson's contributions to the historical analysis of African heritage have enabled our field to investigate the dynamic nature of the archaeological record as it pertains to the many strands of African diasporas. His work has challenged once widely held beliefs of simple forms of acculturation experienced by people of African descent, resulting in an expanding discourse within archaeology on processes of transcultural innovation, creolization, hybridity, and syncretism.

Prof. Thompson's keynote presentation will be followed in the second hour of our three-hour forum with comments by several lead discussants, including Leland Ferguson, Maria Franklin, Grey Gundaker, Jill Koverman, Akin Ogundiran, and Kenneth L. Brown. The third part of this three-hour forum is reserved for open group discussions among all attendees as to the forum theme and any other topics, news, questions, and announcements.

The ADAN extends sincere thanks to individuals and organizations who have provided sponsor support for this annual forum event, including Andrew Agha, Grey Gundaker, Mark Hauser, Nicole Isenbarger, J.W. Joseph, John McCarthy, New South Associates, the John L. Warfield Center for African & African American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, the Department of Africana Studies at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Additional events related to African diaspora archaeology include the following tours, workshops, panels, and symposia (among others) -- [Read or download this full article here in Adobe .pdf format >>>].

At first glance, the book Midlo Hall delivers the reader appears typical of a historical ethnic study but upon closer examination the book explores the intricacies of African ethnicity and the desirable qualities of each ethnicity employed that were so desirable for the institution itself. Midlo Hall looks at every angle of the slave trade with regards to ethnicity. Perhaps in a different study this may be an overload of information, but the greater picture established by the analysis of African ethnicity imported into Colonial and Antebellum America, Brazil, and the Caribbean creates a well crafted analysis of the African Diaspora.

In terms of her data sets, the author employs a series of internet accessible databases concerning the slave trade, both published by other scholars and herself. This publicly accessible data allows the reader to have access to the raw data that underpins the production of this and other similar works. The ability for the public, researchers and lay people alike, to access this data lies at the heart of Midlo Hall's desire for "a better-informed discussion of African cultural influences in various regions in the Americas" (p. 165).

The book is divided into seven chapters. The author's goal of the book may ultimately be to make "invisible Africans visible" (also the title of Chapter 2). At the very least it is one of several that the author must achieve for the book to be a successful example of ethnic studies. If Midlo Hall's goals for Chapters 1 and 2 are to introduce the reader to the intricacies of African ethnic groups and the study of the African Diaspora as a whole, she succeeds. Additionally she wades through the records found on both sides of the Atlantic to infer meaning from the tangled jargon and missing data.

Chapter 3 discusses the myths associated with the idea of a diverse African ethnic background and how the reality was that ethnic groups were clustered regionally in America. She summarily concludes, giving proper thought, that "although Africa is a huge continent with many different peoples, only some of them were involved in the Atlantic slave trade, and relatively few African ethnicities were brought to the Americas in significant numbers" (p. 57). She goes on to discuss the idea that slave ships were scooping up Africans wherever they could be found was false. In fact, she explains that in many cases, slaves were transported from few places along the coast to create a shorter stay on the slave ship for the enslaved. This ensured that more enslaved Africans had the potential to survive and thus protect the ultimate profits of investors.

In addition, Midlo Hall discusses the reasons for the clustering of ethnic groups in America. She establishes a chain of history for the Atlantic slave trade that begins with the Portuguese and their African holdings and that ultimately includes such as Britain, Spain, Holland and France. The clustering theory she presents is established solidly in documentary evidence. For example, Midlo Hall writes that specific crops in Africa needed specialists. In the case of rice, the areas where this crop prevailed in Africa are where slaves were acquired to establish and cultivate the crop in America. In South Carolina, for example, of the total 556 voyages to the colony, 44% came from the rice-cultivating regions of Senegambia and Upper Guinea. Other areas such as Georgia, Florida, Northeast Brazil and the Mississippi Delta have even higher percentages of voyages from Senegambia and Upper Guinea further illustrating Midlo Hall's reasoning for the clustering. Other reasons for the clustering had to do with socialization and the idea that the majority of slave owners wanted their slaves fractionalized, while not wholly untrue, was generally misconstrued.

While Chapter 3 focuses on the overall reasons for the clustering ethnic groups with the Transatlantic slave trade, Chapters 4-6, focus on specific locales in Africa that are notable epicenters of the African Diaspora. Chapter 4 looks at Greater Senegambia and Upper Guinea, the area where the rice cultivation specialty is highest. Because of the knowledge of rice cultivation, Senegambians were clustered more in the American colonies than anywhere else in the Americas.

Chapter 5 concentrates on Lower Guinea: Ivory Coast, Gold Coast, Slave Coast/Bight of Benin, while Chapter 6 takes a close examination of Lower Guinea: Bight of Biafra. In these chapters she tackles the difficult question in regard to the identity of African ethnicities in the Americas. In particular she uses the example of the Mina people to show the inconsistency of slavers, slave owners, record keepers and modern day scholars. She examines why the reoccurring use of "Mina," an ethnic group whose name is used in a variety of ways over time is problematic. The author uses this example to "illustrate the pitfalls of seizing on obvious, nominal similarities to identify African ethnicities" (p. 114). Additionally she establishes how ethnic groups vary with relation to geographical locations such as the 'Gold Coast,' 'Ivory Coast,' i.e. that are named for the natural resource found in that region and how these monikers can add confusion to African ethnicity. She discusses the Igbo, an ethnicity in Africa that has been overlooked traditionally with regards to African ethnicities in the Americas. Here, Midlo Hall adequately discusses how Igbo women, in particular, because of low infant mortality rates were a highly valuable asset in the continuation of slavery. Within Chapter 7, Midlo Hall discusses the Bantulands of West Central Africa and Mozambique. She explains that the slave trade began quite early in this region and ended very late. The clustering of Africans in the Americas can be seen periodically. Africans from Angola are settled in the east coast of South America; the Kongo in the Caribbean and the U.S. coastal regions; and the Bantu, which are found in clusters in all parts of the Americas.

It is clear that Midlo Hall wants to reestablish the links that only remain in the remaining documentary evidence she and other scholars have sought to keep intact. With this work she accomplishes that goal. She is able to relate a documentary poor history by utilizing the document riches contained within the slave databases she has utilized. For matters concerning the American Archaeologist, especially where ethnic studies may arise, this book provides an invaluable resource. Despite the lack of recorded information with regards to slaves, slavery, and the documentation of their roots, this book is a very good example of how much information does exist and when utilized properly, can provide a wealth of knowledge concerning the African Diaspora.

Established by an act of Congress in March 1865, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands was a hasty improvisation designed by Republican congressmen to avert mass starvation and suffering, protect the rule of law and the rights of laborers, and provide the foundation for economic health and peace to return to the South in the aftermath of the Civil War. Its task was unprecedented, and highly controversial, for an agency of the federal government. Prevailing economic theories left little room for government intervention into the economy on behalf of labor, while matters of courtroom justice and disaster relief were traditionally left to local administration and private charities. But, these were unprecedented times and the Republican-led Congress felt a weighty responsibility. The immense social crisis looming that made the bureau necessary came as a direct consequence of U.S. policies--namely the physical destruction of the South wrought by the U.S. armed forces, and the socioeconomic upheaval that resulted from Lincoln's policy of emancipation. Dubbed the "Freedmen's Bureau," the bureau's efforts quickly became consumed with the plight of former slaves and the political objective of establishing the success of emancipation. It would have to do so with limited resources and in the face of a furious opposition (that included the president of the United States) tirelessly denouncing it as an unconstitutional abuse of federal power.

Understandably, in light of its importance, historians of Reconstruction have scrutinized the actions of the Freedmen's Bureau in painstaking detail in plentiful local and generalized studies. It is unsurprising, too, that the reputation of the bureau has risen and fallen along with the broader historiographical trends on Reconstruction. In the 1950s, revisionist historians John Cox and LaWanda Cox rescued the "misrepresented Bureau" from the vilifications of the Dunning school scholars who depicted it as a corrupt and partisan Republican machine. The Coxes helped launch the modern debates over the bureau by emphasizing its achievements, especially in protecting freedpeople's rights and upholding the law.[1] Others were not as impressed. A loosely defined wave of scholarship from the 1960s through the 1980s -- known to specialists as "post-revisionism" -- highlighted the conservatism of the bureau's agenda, which they regarded as compromised by its commitment to capitalism and hamstrung by paternalistic attitudes toward freedpeople akin to those of the southern planters. Eric Foner's 1988 historiographical landmark work Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution elegantly synthesized these contrasting viewpoints by arguing that the bureau's genuine commitment to black advancement was constrained, and at times undercut, by the predominating "free labor ideology" of the Republican Party that placed too much faith in market solutions and failed to reckon with the cultural power of an entrenched racial caste system in the South. Yet, Foner clearly admired the dogged determination of the bureau's leaders in the face of entrenched opposition and regarded the bureau's achievements as considerable in light of the political and ideological constraints of the times.[2]

More than twenty years after Foner's Reconstruction, the historical literature on Reconstruction and the Freedmen's Bureau continues to thrive and expand. Mary Farmer-Kaiser's Freedwomen and the Freedmen's Bureau: Race, Gender and Public Policy in the Age of Emancipation is the latest of a number of important new works to highlight the role of women and gender in Reconstruction, joining notable books by Nancy D. Bercaw, Peter Bardaglio, Laura F. Edwards, Carol Faulkner, Thavolia Glymph, Susan E. O'Donovan, Hannah Rosen, Leslie A. Schwalm, Amy Dru Stanley, and Karen Zipf.[3] In both her approach to the evidence and her argument, Farmer-Kaiser speaks directly to the prevailing historiography on the Freedmen's Bureau.[4] First, she seeks to correct the widespread presumption, echoed by many of the above-named authors, that the Freedmen's Bureau administered its policies without taking gender into consideration. Secondly, she asserts that freedwomen were active agents in forcing bureau agents to consider gender by appealing to the special need for government to protect and assist them as "defenseless" women. In order to demonstrate this, she looks beyond high-level policymakers at the state and federal level and combs through the records of the bureau on the local level in four states -- Virginia, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas -- to uncover the "gendered responses" of local bureau agents to complaints registered by freedwomen (p. 12). She finds that the duty to protect mothers and children was deeply ingrained in the minds of the white middle-class men who served as local agents for the bureau. Close examination of these records show that freedwomen often, but not always, made allies of these agents by appealing to their predisposition to protect mothers and children.

In many ways, Farmer-Kaiser's book exemplifies much of the post-Foner writing on Reconstruction by upholding Foner's paradigm while modifying some of his conclusions. In particular, she begins with Foner's premise that adherence to the "free labor ideology" controlled the response of the bureau agents to conditions in the South, but she adds a gendered dimension to northern ideology that was largely absent from Foner's account. At the heart of Foner's thesis is his judgment that "The Freedmen's Bureau was not, in reality, the agent of the planters, nor was it precisely the agent of the former slaves. It can best be understood as the agent of the northern free labor ideology itself."[5] Farmer-Kaiser strongly endorses this assessment, but she deepens our understanding of this ideology by exploring the "gendered" notion of freedom embedded within it that structured the bureau's attitude towards freedwomen. Her first chapter describes the importance of "true womanhood" to the free labor economic model. From the viewpoint of bureau agents, freedwomen were natural dependents whose proper social and economic role was to cultivate domestic order as wives and mothers. Thus, encouraging women to embrace marriage, motherhood, and middle-class morality was as essential to the free labor ideology as labor contracts and market hegemony.

After providing the intellectual contours of "gendered freedom" in chapter 1, Kaiser-Farmer goes on to examine how presumptions about gender roles shaped the major day-to-day tasks of the Freedmen's Bureau. In four separate chapters, she examines how the bureau performed the following tasks: 1) distributing emergency relief; 2) negotiating and enforcing fair labor contracts; 3) reuniting families and determining custody of freed children; and 4) administering justice in bureau and military courts. One famous area of the bureau's work that Kaiser-Farmer chooses to exclude from her study is its leadership in facilitating the establishment of both public and private schools. Because the bureau did not actually run the schools once they were opened, its relationship with schools was mostly advisory and thus she considers it beyond the scope of the bureau's official duties. This exclusion makes sense within the restricted definition of her study, but it contributes to what may be an overly tight focus on official bureau duties that obscures the collaborations between the bureau and other public and private institutions. As a result, this study portrays the bureau agents and freedwomen somewhat in vacuum, with a laser-like concentration on their direct interactions that sometimes neglects the wider context in which the bureau agents worked hand-in-hand with missionaries, teachers, and school administrators who were carrying out their own "gendered" reconstruction of the South. How these allies influenced the bureau's agents, and how the bureau shared some of its responsibilities to these organizations are important questions left unexplored by this study.

Farmer-Kaiser offers copious evidence to support her theses. In the early days of the Freedmen's Bureau, the bureau favored freedwomen and children over freedmen in distributing relief. She presents stunning statistics that indicate that freedwomen received the bulk of relief support -- as much as 85 percent in some places -- as agents sympathized with widowed wives and abandoned mothers in need, while often rejecting the claims of able-bodied men. Farmer-Kaiser attributes this phenomenon to the Victorian presumptions of bureau workers, who feared that relief to men would promote idleness and create a dependency on government charity -- an especial concern of General Oliver O. Howard, head of the bureau. For stern moralists like Howard, widowed/deserted wives and mothers constituted "the deserving poor" while unemployed men were often "undeserving" idlers. Freedmen's Bureau agents reflected this attitude in their expectation that freedmen ought to assume the role of household provider, which resulted in a willingness to assist women and children whose male providers were absent or unable to perform their role. The men themselves received little sympathy.

One aspect of the "free labor ideology" that Kaiser-Farmer illuminates is the silent gendered presumptions of free market theory. Whereas men were presumed to possess the freedom to enter into a binding contract, married women were not. Marriage contracts trumped labor contracts in the minds of most bureau agents. The question of whether freedwomen ought to work as laborers in the fields was a vexed one. In the North, women's work outside the home violated middle-class gender norms, though it was commonly accepted for working-class and immigrant women, while in the South white planters demanded that black women work in the fields as they did in slavery times. Though often anxious about "idleness" among married freedwomen, agents tended to defer to freedmen to determine the terms of labor for their wives (and children), even to the point of nullifying contracts that did not meet the husband's approval. Although the bureau's official policy was to regard those who refused to sign labor contracts as "vagrants" who could be compelled to work, this policy did not extend to women whose husbands prevented them from laboring in the fields (or limited their laboring hours). While empowering men as rulers of their household on the one hand, the free labor ideology opened a path for women to demand more of their husbands as well. Freedwomen lodged numerous complaints with the bureau against husbands who were abusive, spendthrift, or who otherwise failed to provide adequate support. Interestingly, bureau agents found themselves arbitrating discord within many a household and chastising husbands on behalf of freedwomen.

Although the voices of freedwomen are rarely heard directly in the bureau's records, Farmer-Kaiser does a nice job of culling a few representative stories, and partial stories, that convey the agency of freedwomen had in shaping the policies of Reconstruction. Freedwomen's agency comes through the strongest in their determination to assert their "parental rights" in establishing custody and control over their children. Freedwomen often enlisted the support of the bureau to reclaim their children from former masters who used apprenticeship laws -- or outright kidnapping -- to gain custody of minors to provide cheap labor. Complicating matters, no doubt, was the fact that these "fatherless" children were sometimes the unacknowledged offspring of the white families who claimed them. When seeking justice from the bureau, it became more difficult when black women were accused of being immoral or sexually promiscuous, which chilled the sympathy of the middle-class bureau agents. Bureau agents would not hesitate to remove children from households that were deemed immoral or from parents that could not provide the necessities of life. Though achieving mixed success, freedwomen nevertheless showed an unflinching determination to use whatever power they had to reunite their families and regain custody of their children.

Because of the limitations of her sources, Farmer-Kaiser's book reveals more about the "free labor ideology" and public policy than it does about the thoughts and perceptions of the freedwomen. To what degree did the freedwomen accept or reject middle-class domestic ideals? Were their attempts to play upon northern gender presumptions in their dealings with the bureau merely strategic, or did they share in some of those presumptions? One wonders how the relationships between freedwomen and the middle-class northern white women they encountered in bureau-founded schools and Protestant missions compared with the dynamic between them and the male bureau agents. To what degree were northern white women mediators or facilitators of their complaints to the Freedmen's Bureau? This is not to rob freedwomen of agency, but merely to complicate the context -- a complex cultural encounter with northern men and women -- that provided circumstances of their agency.

Examining the bureau agents' interactions with the private organizations and missionary groups might shed some light on their actions as well. What might appear as a cold-blooded adherence to free market doctrine may appear differently if the same bureau agents who refused to provide government "charity" to able-bodied men did not hesitate to send those men to the missionaries next door. The line between public and private was certainly blurred in the project of Reconstruction, and the extent to which the existence of other sources of northern philanthropy and relief shaped the interactions of freedpeople and bureau agents needs to be considered. Facing the harsh political backlash, the agents of the Freedmen's Bureau surely thought it wise to place as much responsibility for Reconstruction as possible in private hands to deflect the accusation that it provided a government dole to "lazy" blacks. More attention to public-private collaborations is needed, generally, in the study of the Reconstruction period.

Farmer-Kaiser's contribution to the literature is significant in that she is the first scholar to examine in a book-length study how the policies of the Freedmen's Bureau were shaped by gender ideologies. In this endeavor, she has succeeded admirably. The myth that bureau agents remained steadfastly blind to gender differences as the strictures of free labor theory seemed to imply has been definitively exposed. This book is also an important contribution to the history of gender and public policy that follows in the path of scholars like Theda Skocpol and Linda Gordon who have analyzed similar gender presumptions at work in the evolution of the modern welfare state prior to the New Deal. Future studies of Reconstruction, I hope, will explore the ramifications of this insight in a broader context and begin to explore the other ways in which the agents of Reconstruction -- both governmental and nongovernmental -- acted in ways that did not conform to gender-blind economic doctrines and free market mantras.

Notes

[1]. John Cox and LaWanda Cox, "General O.O. Howard and the 'Misrepresented Bureau,'" Journal of Southern History 19 (November 1953): 427-456. Although W. E. B. Du Bois made a strong revisionist case for the Freedmen's Bureau decades in advance of the Coxes, the historical profession largely ignored his work until the 1960s. The revisionist wave of scholarship that the Coxes inaugurated culminated with the landmark studies, John Hope Franklin, Reconstruction After the Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961); and Kenneth Stampp, The Era of Reconstruction, 1865-1877 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965).

[2]. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988). Two influential examples of post-revisionism are William S. McFeely, Yankee Stepfather: General O.O. Howard and the Freedmen (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968); and Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979).

[3]. Surprisingly, the explosion of works that examine gender in the Reconstruction period failed to warrant a chapter of its own in the otherwise comprehensive review of the historiography edited by Thomas J. Brown, Reconstructions: New Perspectives on the Postbellum United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). The major works are: Nancy Dunlap Bercaw, Gendered Freedoms: Race, Rights, and the Politics of Household in the Delta, 1861-1875 (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2003); Peter Bardaglio, Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex, and the Law in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Laura F. Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction (Urbana: University of Illinios, 1997); Carol Faulkner, Women's Radical Reconstruction: The Freedmen's Aid Movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Susan E. O'Donovan, Becoming Free in the Cotton South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007); Hannah Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Leslie A. Schwalm, A Hard Fight For We: Women's Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998);and Karin L. Zipf, Labor of Innocents: Forced Apprenticeship in North Carolina, 1715-1919 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005).

[4]. What has been called the "New Freedmen's Bureau Historiography" is reviewed in John David Smith, "'The Work It Did Not Do Because It Could Not': Georgia and the 'New' Freemen's Bureau Historiography," Georgia Historical Quarterly 82 (Summer 1998): 331-349; Paul A. Cimbala and Randall M. Miller, eds., The Freedmen's Bureau and Reconstruction: Reconsiderations (New York: Fordham University Press, 1999); and Robert Harrison, "New Representations of a 'Misrepresented Bureau': Reflections on Recent Scholarship on the Freedmen's Bureau," American Nineteenth Century History 8 (June 2007): 205-229.

[5]. Eric Foner, Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 101.

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H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Florida, http://www.h-net.org/~florida/ (Nov. 2010).

Frank Andre Guridy. Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow. University of North Carolina Press, 2010. xiv + 270 pp., $59.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8078-3361-2; $22.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8078-7103-4.

Reviewed for H-Florida by Jeff Donnelly, Miami Design Preservation League

Ninety Miles Away, But Not So Far Apart

Frank Andre Guridy has produced a fascinating study of "cross national exchange between Afro-Cubans and African Americans" (p. 2). While the focus of this book is on four specific stories, the author's ambitions extend to commentary on the phenomenon of diaspora, the awareness and kaleidoscopic expression of a people's migration in multiple national and temporal contexts. Guridy contends that "Afro-descended peoples in Cuba and the United States came to identify themselves as being part of a transcultural African diaspora, an identification that did not contradict black aspirations for national citizenship" (p. 4). In development of his thesis, Guridy has selected four exemplary moments in U.S. and Cuban republican history: Booker T. Washington's effort to enroll Afro-Cubans in his Tuskegee Institute, the role of Garveyism in Cuba, the interface of the Harlem Renaissance and afrocubanismo, and the development of Afrocentric tourism in Cuba and the United States before the Cuban Revolution.

Guridy has uncovered a Tuskegee-Cuba connection not widely noted in other commentary. From archival sources, Guridy documents the efforts of Washington to enable African-descended students from other nations, including Cuba, to attend his Tuskegee Institute. Guridy concludes that Cubans attending Tuskegee were able to use that experience as a way to achieve upward mobility in Cuban society, especially in the field of architecture, a program that attracted most of the successful male Afro-Cubans at Tuskegee. The building housing the major twentieth-century Afro-Cuban cultural center, Club Atenas, was designed by a Tuskegee alumnus, Luis Delfin Valdes.

In his second example, Guridy points out that Cuba had more "divisions" or chapters of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) than any other country outside the United States. Garvey's cosmopolitan movement not only involved people of varying nationalities, but also relied on the efforts of many whose life stories included extensive migrations among Caribbean countries and the United States. These migrations, in Guridy's view, contributed to the creation of a diasporic consciousness, sometimes expressed as "the Negro peoples of the world." Guridy also locates the role of Garveyism in Cuba, highlighting the tensions the UNIA movement produced in a society not fully comfortable with its multiracial reality and its racial hierarchies.

Langston Hughes appears in the third segment of Guridy's story, which includes a detailed account of Hughes and his search for the "heartbeat and songbeat of Africa" in Cuba (p. 135). This is perhaps the most developed section of Forging Diaspora and where the specific examples selected by Guridy best exemplify his thesis: African Americans and Afro-Cubans discovered a commonality without losing their nationality. Poetry, art, sculpture, and music all figure in the development of this section, but the most vivid moments occur when Hughes discovers that the patrons and musicians of the Afro-Cuban dance halls are "Mi gente" (p. 133).

The final section of Guridy's work describes the advent of African American tourism in Cuba and Afro-Cuban visits to the United States. In both cases, the tourists had to overcome obstacles arising from racial discrimination, and Guridy provides some revealing examples of the comparison and contrast between the racial hierarchies of the United States and Cuba. In this section, racial uplift, advocacy for civil rights, and black entrepreneurship combine in complex ways, delineating and overcoming the racialization of leisure in both countries. Guridy highlights the role of Howard University in this period.

Guridy relates each of these four stories in a felicitous summation of his extensive archival research. He provides, from each of the stories, evidence that both African Americans and Afro-Cubans developed an awareness of their common experience and national differences through their contacts. His work presumes some basic knowledge of African American history in the United States, the imperial project of the United States, the history of race relations in the Cuban republic, and the wider intellectual and cultural context of negritude. At the end, Guridy's book provokes more questions than it provides answers. Forging Diaspora will encourage readers to explore more deeply by demonstrating that substantial understanding of any one of these topics requires a better understanding of the others.

Guridy discussed his book further in the context of American imperialism and the African diapora at the African American History Panel at the Harlem Book Fair, on July 10, 2010. In this discussion, He offered a more concise statement of his concept of the African diaspora. His comments can be heard or read at http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/294543-6&showFullAbstract=1.

Copyright (c) 2010 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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©2010 African Diaspora Archaeology Network
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