In this issue we present the following articles, news, announcements, and reviews:

This newsletter feature on "profiles in practice" provides brief overviews of the recent activities of researchers and activists in African diaspora subjects. Please contact Chris Fennell (cfennell@illinois.edu) if you would like to contribute a profile for a future newsletter issue.

Dr. Laurie A. Wilkie is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. She is renowned internationally within our field for translating abstract social theories into clear, applicable analytic frameworks to employ in the challenges of uncovering and interpreting archaeological evidence. Historical archaeology has grown in the past few decades into a mature discipline of global scope. Wilkie's scholarship is required reading across that international stage of studies. For example, her 2000 book Creating Freedom: Material Culture and African American Identity (Louisiana State U. Press) provides a revelation of the way to apply abstract social theories in direct, tangible ways to archaeological research questions. Her charting of these often turgid theoretical waters remains invaluable to students and professionals.

Wilkie's international reputation is similarly evident in her 2009 election as a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and her numerous invited talks both in the United States and overseas. She is likewise known as one of the finest writers in our discipline, a talent demonstrated in her multiple book awards. Wilkie has similarly received numerous honors and awards at the University of California, including a Goldman Distinguished Professor appointment. Her legacy continues through the work of a large number of her talented doctoral advisees who are now faculty members at universities.

Her 2003 study, The Archaeology of Mothering: An African-American Midwife's Tale (Routledge), stands as an exemplar of "intersectional" analysis. She applies multiple dimensions of social theory to show how poverty, age, racism, and sexism impacted the lives of African-American women in the past and present. Her 2005 book (with Paul Farnsworth), Sampling Many Pots: A Historical Archaeology of a Multi-Ethnic Bahamian Community, continued such multi-dimensional analysis of African diaspora experiences. This study examines the entanglements of enslaved Afro-Bahamians' diverse cultural heritage within the oppressive structures of enslavement, sexism, and global commodity chains.

Wilkie's 2010 Lost Boys of Zeta Psi: A Historical Archaeology of Masculinity at a University Fraternity (U. Calif. Press) shows her talent as a humanist who combines insightful social science with a creative writing approach to produce a thoroughly engaging narrative. In this study she tells the story of a research project and its findings through the structure of a play in five acts invoking the features of a "creation myth" in J. M. Barrie's 1904 play, Peter Pan. In this study she began exploring elements of shifting frames of gender, masculinity, feminism, and queer theory. As in other works, Wilkie also enlivened the analysis by employing insights from Black feminist and critical race theories. She further advances this scholarship and research in a her 2024 book, Unburied Lives: The Historical Archaeology of Buffalo Soldiers at Fort Davis, Texas, 1869–1875 (U. New Mexico Press), and numerous peer-reviewed articles, including explorations of the social identities of African-American "Buffalo Soldiers" in nineteenth-century Texas, and the multiple dimensions of "ableism."

This mastery of applications of social theory in archaeology was also demonstrated in her 2014 Strung Out on Archaeology: An Introduction to Archaeological Research (Routledge). This volume received acclaim as an excellent text for graduate and advanced undergraduate courses on the history of theory developments within the field. She has provided a voice of intellectual insight in each phase of new theoretical debates within our field. Her chapters (with co-authors) in The Culture History of Objects in the Modern Age (Bloomsbury) carried that trajectory forward. Newer theoretical frameworks called "relational ontologies" and a "new materialism" have gained popularity among many archaeologists internationally, particularly those examining societies that predated European colonial expansions of the past several centuries. Wilkie's scholarship again speaks with intellectual prowess and a focus on the broader impacts of social science research. While exploring the benefits that these new frameworks can offer, she carefully cautions against a "post-humanist" perspective that would abandon an emphasis on human accountability and social justice insights that can be attained through careful studies of the past. Her paper "Living in the Past for a Better Future" continues this commitment to engage with social justice in contemporary settings. Through this commitment to an engaged discipline that works to apply lessons from research to inform today's social justice debates, she has also been a leading figure in shaping the domain referred to as "contemporary archaeology."

From the Society for Historical Archaeology (SHA) -- "The J.C. Harrington Award for 2025 will be presented to Dr. Paul A. Shackel. Paul has benefited the SHA and the discipline on multiple fronts, including the coordination of multiple conferences and the guest editing of six thematic issues of Historical Archaeology. His work at Harpers Ferry, New Philadelphia, on the Anthracite Heritage Project, and on the archaeology of industrial labor are all landmarks in the field. His scholarship is prodigious and his promotion of an activist archaeology that reveals events like the Lattimer Massacre have engaged descendant communities in recognizing the challenges of racism and inequality in the past and present. He is a prodigious author who has impacted the field through publications and presentations as well as his teaching and leadership at the University of Maryland, College Park as a Department Chair and lead for the Department's PhD program, established in 2007." The award will be presented at the SHA's annual Conference on Historical and Underwater Archaeology on January 10, 2025 in New Orleans. New Philadelphia, Illinois was the first town planned in advance in legally founded by African Americans. Paul Shackel and broad array of community members and researchers launched an archaeology project in 2002 which led to the town site being designated as America's 424th National Park in 2022.

From the Society for Historical Archaeology -- "The SHA is pleased to announce the award of the 2025 John L. Cotter Award to Christopher Barton for his work on race, racialization, community engagement, and collaborative archaeology through his multi-year partnership with the Black community of Timbuctoo in Westhampton, New Jersey and the lectures and publications stemming from this work at the start of his career." The award will be presented at the SHA's annual Conference on Historical and Underwater Archaeology on January 10, 2025 in New Orleans. Read an early newsletter article and a review of Dr. Barton's 2022 book on the Timbuctoo project.

From the Society for Historical Archaeology -- "This year's SHA Gilmore Dissertation Award will be presented to Johanna Pacyga for her 2022 University of Chicago dissertation, Cultivating Catholicism: Gender, Vocation, and Missionization in Colonial Senegal (CA. 1860-1930). Dr. Pacyga's dissertation makes an unusual contribution not only to historical archaeology but also to African studies, colonial studies, and the history of religion. Her research is based on extended archaeological fieldwork and archival work to investigate a little-known missionary site in Senegal, and the dissertation examines how and to what extent missionization involved the 'civilizing mission' of modifying food cultivation, preparation, and consumption as well as body comportment through hygiene and dress. The dissertation asks: 'To what extent did converting souls mean converting bodies and landscapes?' Fieldwork uncovered intriguing material contrasts between the main convent complex and the adjacent village and tensions between the French sisters of St. Joseph of Cluny and the West African Daughters of the Holy Heart of Mary. Her careful research enriches our understanding of missionization through the lens of gender." The award will be presented at the SHA's annual Conference on Historical and Underwater Archaeology on January 8, 2025 in New Orleans. You can read her article-length overview of this study in the Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage web site.

From the Society for Historical Archaeology -- "The SHA is delighted to announce the winners of the 2025 Mark E. Mack Community Engagement Awards! First place: Jefferson Patterson Park and Museum. Second place: West Baltimore Community Archaeology Project. Third place: Oak Grove Colored-William P. Johnston Cemetery Team. The Mark E. Mack Community Engagement Award honors those individual researchers or research project teams that exhibit outstanding best practices in community collaboration, engagement, and outreach in their historical archaeology and heritage preservation work." The awards will be presented at the SHA's annual Conference on Historical and Underwater Archaeology on January 10, 2025 in New Orleans.

From The Gilder Lehrman Center -- "Yale University's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition today has announced the winners of the twenty-sixth annual Frederick Douglass Book Prize, one of the most coveted awards for the study of the African American experience."

"The 2024 Prize will be shared by two scholars. The co-winners are Marlene L. Daut for 'Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution' (University of North Carolina Press) and Sara E. Johnson for 'Encyclopédie Noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry's Intellectual World' (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and University of North Carolina Press)."

"This annual prize, jointly sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in New York City and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition (GLC) at Yale University, recognizes the best book written in English on the topics of slavery, resistance, or abolition copyrighted in the preceding year. The $25,000 prize, shared by the two winners, will be presented to Daut and Johnson at an award ceremony sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute at Trinity Church in New York City on February 11, 2025."

"From a total of 82 submissions, the finalists were selected by a jury of scholars that included Amy Murrell Taylor (Chair), T. Marshall Hahn Jr. Professor of History at the University of Kentucky; Natasha J. Lightfoot, Associate Professor of History at Columbia University; and John K. Thornton, Professor of History and African American Studies at Boston University."

"'These two extraordinary books,' Taylor notes, 'are unique in focus but converge in the common quest to uncover the intellectual legacies of slavery and enslaved people, through wide-ranging and inventive readings of texts.' Both authors, she continues, 'see in the French Caribbean, and the intellectual labors of Haitian people, the roots of modern thought about slavery and freedom, racism and colonialism.'"

"In addition to Daut and Johnson, the other finalists for the 2024 prize were: Kerri K. Greenidge for 'The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family' (Liveright Publishing Corporation); and Emily A. Owens for 'Consent in the Presence of Force: Sexual Violence and Black Women's Survival in Antebellum New Orleans' (University of North Carolina Press)." Read more here.

The Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage (Taylor & Francis Press) includes open access articles. You can find these on the journal website (link). Examples of articles currently available with free access include:

"Bioarchaeological Approaches to African Diasporas in the Twenty-First Century: Intercontinental and Global Legacies of Displacement," by Kristrina A. Shuler and Andreana S. Cunningham. Abstract: Bioarchaeological research offers a window into health and life experiences in the past, including the biocultural dimensions of social identities and structural inequalities experienced by enslaved and free Afro-descendants across the African diaspora. Given the long history of descendant communities and advocates contesting the authority of institutions to curate human remains in perpetuity, critical dialogues over the past several decades have stimulated new directions in the discipline of African diaspora bioarchaeology alongside increased engagement with Black scholarship and community and client-based collaborations. We build upon previous discussions and critiques to examine the current state of African diaspora bioarchaeology in global context in the early decades of the twenty-first century. We present a macro-level, chronological examination of published African diaspora and colonial African bioarchaeological research by region between 2001 and 2023 and conclude with a discussion of the current state of practices and engagement in the field and ethics of care. Keywords: African diaspora, Afro-descendants, slavery, emancipation, structural violence, bioarchaeology, human skeletal remains, ethics of care (article link).

"Enslavement to Enlistment: Refiguring Opportunity for African Americans in the Military," by Katherine Hayes and Sophie Minor. Abstract: What does "opportunity" look like for African Americans in the United States military? While the military has been viewed as a vehicle for protecting freedom, it has done so in conditions of racial capitalism and settler colonialism. Through these analytical lenses, opportunity is generally idealized as property, but we propose that Black individuals associated with the military may have seen opportunity as relationality through land and place. We discuss Black constructions of opportunity at the military site of Fort Snelling in Minnesota during the nineteenth century, from enslaved individuals to enlisted Black Regulars garrisoned in the 1880s. Changing expectations of labor and social landscape shaped these opportunities, configured within structures of racism which were themselves adapting to the efforts of African Americans to seek opportunity. We offer archaeological materials and historical documents for potential use in public interpretation that attends to both oppression and creative pursuits of opportunity. Keywords: U.S. military, slavery, black regulars, settler colonialism, critical Indigenous studies (article link).

"Black Disability Politics in Black Military Service: A Perspective from Nineteenth-Century Fort Davis, Texas," by Laurie A. Wilkie and Katherine M. Kinkopf. Abstract: This article considers the role of the military in debilitating Black soldiers, focusing on the men who served in the Western Frontier immediately following the end of the Civil War, with particular attention to the men who served at Fort Davis, one of a string of posts located in West Texas. We frame this archaeological and archival research with critical disability studies to show how these men were motivated by what has recently been termed "Black Disability Politics," acting both individually and collectively for their community's care. The men, popularly known as the "Buffalo Soldiers," occupy an important space in heritage narratives around citizenship rights, valor, and masculine achievement among African-descended people. Understanding fully the circumstances they endured and overcame contributes nuance and dimensionality to that history, while also providing a lens through which to understand the challenges faced by women and Black and Indigenous People of Color in the military today. Keywords: Black disability politics, critical disability studies, historical archaeology,biopolitics, health (article link).

"Valongo, the Place of the Ancestors: Spiritual Practices among Enslaved Africans in Nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro," by Tania Andrade Lima. Abstract: In 2017, UNESCO added Valongo Wharf to its list of World Heritage Sites. Located in Rio de Janeiro's Port Zone, the wharf is a place of memory associated with the transatlantic slave trade, which has been compared to other sites that have witnessed intense human suffering, such as Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Gorée Island, among others. This chapter explores the spiritual practices of the "wretched of the Earth," as Frantz Fanon named those Africans dehumanized by European colonialism. More specifically, it focuses on the Africans shipped to Valongo to be sold as slaves in Rio de Janeiro and who left vestiges of their spiritual beliefs, recovered through archaeological research. Here, these remains are analyzed from a decolonial perspective, born from the reflections of critical Latin American thinkers who reject the diverse forms of domination and oppression inflicted by Northern hemisphere powers on subaltern populations of the global South. Keywords: Valongo Wharf, urban slavery, spiritual beliefs, decolonial thought, diasporic communities, historical archaeology, archaeology of the African diaspora, descendant communities (article link).

"Renegotiating and Theorizing Heritage in the Context of 'Disaster' in the Caribbean: The Entanglement of Haitian Disaster-Related Histories," by Joseph Sony Jean and Jerry Michel. Abstract: This article examines how cultural heritage is negotiated in disaster contexts. One month after the earthquake on August 14, 2021 in Haiti, we surveyed damaged heritage sites and spoke with residents in the South and Grande-Anse departments about their experiences and perceptions. Via this research, we found a lack of disaster preparedness and few existing response mechanisms for managing cultural heritage amidst disaster. This article argues for more attention to heritage theory and practice in relation to disaster. It also shares concrete information about our research and its outcomes to create a dialogue between research needs and actual research results. Local voices are fundamental to the planning and decision-making necessary to sustain the future of Haiti's cultural heritage. Heritage studies in the Caribbean need to formulate and theorize more cogent critical questions about heritage – in particular, about how it is envisioned in urgent times. Keywords: Heritage studies, archaeological heritage, disaster, Caribbean, Haiti, coloniality, local voices, urgency (article link).

presentations of subjects concerning African diaspora archaeology.

Events include a "Slave Revolt Tour," round-table luncheon discussions on "Burial Grounds as Places to Interpret Heritage: Innovative Approaches" and "Community Archaeology," and numerous awards honoring researchers in African diaspora subjects, including the J. C. Harrington, John L. Cotter, Kathleen Kirk Gilmore Dissertation, and Mark E. Mack Community Engagement awards.

Subject matter symposia include: the Archaeology of Harriet Tubman's Birthplace; Reconstructing Plantation Landscapes: Decolonization, Tenancy, and African American Communities in Virginia and Beyond; The Plantation in the Right-of-Way: Data Recovery at St. Rosalie Plantation, Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana; From Maroon Colonoware to Chinese Diaspora: Exploring Domestic Ceramics and Material Culture in Global Contexts; Statuary and Memorial Commemoration of Minorities - Why They are Missing: Challenges and Controversies of Memory and Tradition; Historical Archaeology of Chesapeake Landscapes in Transition; From Foodways to Flora: Exploring Zooarchaeology, Botanical Analysis, and African Diaspora in Urban and Coastal Archaeological Contexts; Social Landscapes of Settler Colonialism in the Caribbean; Archaeology in the Community: 15 Years of Archaeology Service; Landscapes of Black and Indigenous Legacies of Resistance, Human Rights, and Archaeology in Latin America; Art and Material Culture of Enslavement: Exploring African Diaspora, Illegal Trade, and Landscapes of Slavery; Landscapes in Dispute, Territorial Futures: Restitution and Reparation in the Face of Enclosure, Industrialization, and Extractivism.

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Undefeated: Black Resilience through Resistance, Creativity, and Cooperation

15th Annual Lemon Project Spring Symposium
College of William and Mary, School of Education, 301 Monticello Avenue, Williamsburg, Virginia, March 21-22, 2025.

The schedule for the 15th Annual Lemon Project Spring Symposium, "Undefeated: Black Resilience through Resistance, Creativity, and Cooperation," to be held March 21-22, 2025, is now available. Dr. Daniel Black, who took part in the 12th Annual Lemon Project Spring Symposium, returns this year, providing the keynote address on the morning of Friday, March 21. This symposium will be held both in person at the William & Mary School of Education and virtually over Zoom. All are welcome to attend this free event. Registration will open in January.

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The Black Indian Ocean:
Slavery, Religion, and Expressive Cultures (1400-1700)

MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale
Virtual conference, April 2-3, 2025.

From the conference organizers -- This interdisciplinary conference on The Black Indian Ocean: Slavery, Religion, and Expressive Cultures (1400-1700) seeks to explore new perspectives on the impact of slavery, religions, migration and displacement across the Indian Ocean on Afro-Asian communities and their expressive cultures in the early modern world (1400-1700). It aims to uncover the untold musical histories of migration and migratory histories of music around the Indian Ocean world and beyond, how these mobilities can be identified in various cultural manifestations, and how expressive cultures and ritual articulated identity, self-fashioning, community and resistance to human rights' violations.

While scholars have written extensively on the histories of slavery, trade, religions, migration and the circulation of material culture around the Indian Ocean since ancient times, the multifaceted nature of early modern Afro-Asian entanglements and encounters that constituted these Indian Ocean worlds has posed an array of challenges for studies endeavoring to capture their multivalent intersections with cultural practices, especially intangible heritage, and local knowledge systems.

The conference is deliberately articulated under the provocative title of the 'Black Indian Ocean' to serve as a counter dialogue to scholarly diaspora studies on the early modern Black Atlantic and the massive impact of the Black Atlantic slave trade, religious and trade networks on cultural mobilities and their enduring impact in the Americas, which has received considerable attention, and instead to focus on parallel themes in the Indian Ocean slave trade which predated the Atlantic and Islamic slave trades by centuries, was on a scale of equal magnitude, and yet in-depth scholarly examination on early modern arts remains limited.

The conference takes its starting point from the true story of Gabriel, a 16th-century Ethiopian Jew who was enslaved in Asia and converted to Islam, to address wider themes around religion, ritual, slavery, race, agency, and migration in the early modern Indian Ocean world; musical and other artistic representations of race, lament, violence, grief, slavery and IOW cultures; and the research and processes behind recreating past slave narratives, such as Gabriel's Odyssey, developed by the Kukutana Ensemble.

Gabriel's Odyssey is a musical narrative that tells the incredible 16th-century story of Gabriel, a Beta Israel Ethiopian Jew, who was abducted as a young child and sold into slavery in the Arab world, and his woeful wanderings between faiths, love and persecution in Asia to his final encounters with the Portuguese Inquisition in Goa. Drawing on imaginary and sumptuous soundscapes, visuals and voices of an early modern Indian Ocean world, Gabriel's life represents a universal story of oppression, faith, migration and self-fashioning like the experiences of countless other early modern Africans.

Scholars from African Studies and South Asian Studies, including early modern cultural historians, historians, (ethno)musicologists, anthropologists, art historians, race scholars, and practitioners are invited to submit papers that engage renewed analytical attention to the intersections between slavery, religions, migration and displacement across the Indian Ocean on Afro-Asian communities and their expressive cultures in the early modern world (1400-1700) through established or emerging scholarship, without disciplinary limitations, that address (but are not limited to) the following themes: the impact of religion, ritual, slavery, and migration on Afro-Asian communities in the early; modern Indian Ocean world and their expressive cultures; dynamics of enslavement, faith, and power in the IOW and how communities and individuals drew on their faiths and cultural expressions to survive and resist; musical and artistic representations and reenactments of slavery, race, lament, violence, grief in IOW cultures; new perspectives on archives and research methodologies and the characterization and telling of the long history of Africans in the Indian subcontinent; theories of ontology, religion and violence; intercultural encounters in religion in the Afro-Asian soundscape; the Indian Ocean as an early modern African diasporic site and notions of oceanic "cosmopolitanism"; Habshi life around the IOW basin and links to slave trading in the Horn of Africa and the Arab world; how early modern social categories such as gender, religion, caste, ethnicity and origin intersected with relations of slavery and servitude; religious persecution in 16th-century Portuguese India; impact of gender: women in early modern IOW slavery and their cultural manifestations; questions of narrative, representation and positionality in re-telling and reconstructing slave histories or past narratives, especially those involving race, violence, lament or grief; the circulation of early modern musical cultures and objects as linked to African and Asian cases of displacement or mobility; documenting and conceptualizing music and materials that moved or were moved across the Indian ocean.

The 2-day international conference on The Black Indian Ocean will be held online on April 2-3, 2025. This will be followed by an in-person live performance by the Afro-Asian Kukutana Ensemble of Gabriel's Odyssey at Yale MacMillan Center on April 4, 2025, free and open to the public. We strongly encourage all delegates in the greater New Haven region, who are able to travel to Yale, to attend the US première of Gabriel's Odyssey.

A selection of conference papers will be published in an edited volume (press to be confirmed), together with the 16th-century slave narrative and musical and visual artworks of Gabriel's Odyssey by the Kukutana Ensemble.

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Imagining Caribbean Futures Symposium

Caribbean Coalition at Berkeley
University of California at Berkeley, April 10-11, 2025

From the symposium organizers -- Overview: The Caribbean Coalition at Berkeley is proud to announce Imagining Caribbean Futures, a two-day interdisciplinary symposium. The Caribbean Coalition is an initiative at UC Berkeley committed to creating community and fostering connections among people who either identify as Caribbean or stand in solidarity with Caribbean peoples and their self-determined futures. The symposium is geared towards graduate students, postdocs, junior scholars, and faculty, whose work broadly explores: what are Caribbean futures? We especially encourage graduate students to apply and contribute to the conversation.

Thematic threads: Modernity and the Anthropocene: Thinking with Climate, Environment, Ecology and Disaster; Sovereignty and Subjecthood: (Post)colonial Caribbean Identities & Self-Determination; Toward Repair and Radical Imagination: Coloniality, Debt, Redress Note: We recognize that the expansiveness of Caribbean thought and scholarship cannot be entirely encapsulated by the thematic threads. Therefore, we hope these themes serve as guiding inquiries and suggestions rather than restrictive boundaries.

Submission Guidelines and Procedure: The abstract length should be up to 250 words. The abstract should contain contact information (name, institutional affiliation, email, and mailing address) and be submitted in Word or PDF format. Presentations can be in the format of a paper. Please submit via this Google Form.

Presentation Format: Presentations will be assigned panels based on themes explored in submissions. Presentations will be between 15-20 minutes and will be followed by discussion. Participants are expected to submit papers and visuals 1 week before the symposium.

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New Book

Transformations in History:
African Societies and Economies in The Works of Paul Lovejoy
By Toyin Falola
De Gruyter Oldenbourg
299 pp., ISBN-13 978-3111342078, 2024.

Description from the Publisher:

The book uses the main body of Lovejoy's work to speak to core African and economic history issues. It thoroughly examines Lovejoy's contributions to the study of Africa, particularly in exploring issues around production and exchanges at local, regional and international levels. The book offers readers a fresh perspective on the discourse of slavery and colonialism while simultaneously introducing them to the quality of work already accomplished by a stellar scholar.

As the book argues, Lovejoy presents verifiable historical data that nudges us to reconsider our perception of Africa's growth trajectory, especially before its encounter with the Americas. A chapter examines the various ways by which the people experienced slavery before it became proliferated during the time Europeans entered into the business. Another chapter addresses questions about the progressive efforts of slave traders to access the interior to drive more victims who would be shipped to the Atlantic for the business of servitude to advance the European economy. Alongside this exploration, a provides the background as to the contributions of Africans to ensure the continuity of this business. Lovejoy notes, for instance, that Muslims were found in every region in the Americas during slavery, which indicates that they were being taken there through transatlantic slavery. While Muslims were found in these areas, it was not true that they were there in large numbers. This is underscored by their resistance to all forms of forced extraction of the people from their homeland. In essence, they challenged the system in ways that redefined their participation in the exercise. The book analyzes how Muslims ensured that economic and political power were withdrawn from the hands of the victims and how they systematically created institutions that promoted that very inequity.

Lovejoy's extensive knowledge allows us to develop theories and establish applicable methodologies for understanding African reality since the precolonial era. He presents original perspectives about addressing issues of African-American engagements and the roles of critical voices in the diaspora. Consequently, the book is an invaluable educational resource, particularly for people who want to deepen their understanding of African social and economic history.

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New Book

Grappling with Monuments of Oppression: Moving from Analysis to Activism
Edited by Christopher C. Fennell
Routledge Press
252 pp., ISBN-13 978-1032735153, 2024.

Description from the Publisher:

Grappling with Monuments of Oppression provides a timely analysis of the diverse approaches being used around the world to confront colonial and imperial monuments and to promote social equity.

Presenting 12 interdisciplinary, international case studies, this volume explores the ways in which the materiality of social domination can be combated. With contributions from activists, scholars, artists, and policymakers, the book envisions the theme of restorative justice in heritage and archaeology as encompassing initiatives for the reconciliation of past societal transgressions using processes that are multivocal, dialogic, historically informed, community-based, negotiated, and transformative. Arguing that monuments to historical figures who engaged in oppressive regimes provide rich opportunities for dialogue and negotiation, chapters within the book demonstrate that, by confronting these monuments, citizens can envision new ways to address the context and significance of the figures they memorialize and the many people who were targets of their oppression. Contributors to the book also provide a toolkit of methods and strategies for addressing the continuing structures of social domination.

Grappling with Monuments of Oppression will be essential reading for academics and students working in heritage studies, archaeology, anthropology, material culture studies, landscape analysis, and museum studies. It will also be of great interest to practitioners and activists around the world. View an excerpt and table of contents.

This book is included in the Restorative Justice in Heritage Studies and Archaeology book series.

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New Book

Monuments and Memory: Archaeological Perspectives on Commemoration
Edited by John H. Jameson, Sherene Baugher, and Richard Veit
University Press of Florida
318 pp., ISBN-13 978-0813079233, 2024.

Description from the Publisher:

Examining the pasts, evolving meanings, and silenced histories surrounding public monuments. This volume examines many different public monuments to increase understanding of the cultural factors that have shaped their creation, maintenance, and—in some cases—removal. The role of monuments in communities and society continues to be an important and controversial topic, and the case studies in this volume contribute to this conversation by assessing the ways such markers can be empowering or marginalizing from a wide range of perspectives.

The monuments discussed here represent historical events from the Revolutionary War through the Korean War, including the "slave auction block" formerly located on the streets of Fredericksburg, Virginia; memorials to Confederate soldiers across the South and in northern POW cemeteries; and the Pullman National Monument in Chicago for workers who participated in the 1894 Pullman Strike. This volume also highlights the dearth of statues memorializing the achievements of women and minorities, especially women of color, and contributors discuss whether recent movements advocating for more inclusive histories will lead to an increase in monuments honoring people whose narratives have been suppressed.

Looking at the powerful role of monuments in conveying the memory of history to future generations, the contributors to Monuments and Memory show why it is important to address the messages of these sites and ask whose histories they may be silencing. This book demonstrates how conversations surrounding preservation and interpretation of monuments encourage community involvement. A volume in the series Cultural Heritage Studies, edited by Katherine Hayes.

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New Book

Brooklynites: The Remarkable Story of the
Free Black Communities that Shaped a Borough
By Prithi Kanakamedala
NYU Press
288 pp., ISBN-13 978-1479833092, 2024.

Description from the Publisher:

Meet the Black Brooklynites who defined New York City's most populous borough through their search for social justice. Before it was a borough, Brooklyn was our nation's third largest city. Its free Black community attracted people from all walks of life-businesswomen, church leaders, laborers, and writers-who sought to grow their city in a radical anti-slavery vision. The residents of neighborhoods like DUMBO, Fort Greene, and Williamsburg organized and agitated for social justice. They did so even as their own freedom was threatened by systemic and structural racism, risking their safety for the sake of their city. Brooklynites recovers the lives of these remarkable citizens and considers their lasting impact on New York City's most populous borough.

This cultural and social history is told through four ordinary families from Brooklyn's nineteenth-century free Black community: the Crogers, the Hodges, the Wilsons, and the Gloucesters. The book illustrates the depth and scope of their activism, cementing Brooklyn's place in the history of social justice movements. Their lives offer valuable lessons on freedom, democracy, and family-both the ones we're born with and the ones we choose. Their powerful stories continue to resonate today, as borough residents fill the streets in search of a more just city. This is a story of land, home, labor, of New Yorkers past, and the legacy they left us. This is the story of Brooklyn.



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New Book

Archaeology, Heritage and Tourism in West Africa: A Crossroads of Knowledge
By Samuel Oluwole Ogundele
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
234 pp., ISBN13: 978-1-0364-1381-1, 2024.

Description from the Publisher:

West Africa is a rich storehouse of heritage resources belonging to different time periods. Archaeologists attempt to exhume, analyse, and interpret aspects of human history found in artifacts and their contexts. The longstanding assumption that archaeology is simply a science of the past, with little thought for the present, must be rejected. This book makes a striking argument for a curricular revolution which taps into the strengths of such allied fields as heritage, tourism, and museum management, which come together to constitute Cultural Resource Management (CRM). This account reveals, in an inspiringly clear fashion, that the era of conceptualising archaeology as a near-complete academic exercise is over.

Trans-disciplinary knowledge application, such as that which is found in CRM, has the capacity to create employment opportunities for archaeologists, and other cultural resource management graduates, in West Africa and beyond. It is time to take a first step in constructing the pathways of progress in the competitive world of modern education.

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New Book

Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery
By Seth Rockman
University of Chicago Press
496 pp., ISBN-13 978-0226723457, 2024.

Description from the Publisher:

An eye-opening rethinking of nineteenth-century American history that reveals the interdependence of the Northern industrial economy and Southern slave labor. The industrializing North and the agricultural South -- that's how we have been taught to think about the United States in the early nineteenth century. But in doing so, we overlook the economic ties that held the nation together before the Civil War. We miss slavery's long reach into small New England communities, just as we fail to see the role of Northern manufacturing in shaping the terrain of human bondage in the South. Using plantation goods -- the shirts, hats, hoes, shovels, shoes, axes, and whips made in the North for use in the South -- historian Seth Rockman locates the biggest stories in American history in the everyday objects that stitched together the lives and livelihoods of Americans -- white and Black, male and female, enslaved and free -- across an expanding nation.

By following the stories of material objects, such as shoes made by Massachusetts farm women that found their way to the feet of a Mississippi slave, Rockman reveals a national economy organized by slavery—a slavery that outsourced the production of its supplies to the North, and a North that outsourced its slavery to the South. Melding business and labor history through powerful storytelling, Plantation Goods brings northern industrialists, southern slaveholders, enslaved field hands, and paid factory laborers into the same picture. In one part of the country, entrepreneurs envisioned fortunes to be made from "planter's hoes" and rural women spent their days weaving "negro cloth" and assembling "slave brogans." In another, enslaved people actively consumed textiles and tools imported from the North to contest their bondage. In between, merchants, marketers, storekeepers, and debt collectors laid claim to the profits of a thriving interregional trade.

Examining producers and consumers linked in economic and moral relationships across great geographic and political distances, Plantation Goods explores how people in the nineteenth century thought about complicity with slavery while showing how slavery structured life nationwide and established a modern world of entrepreneurship and exploitation. Rockman brings together lines of American history that have for too long been told separately, as slavery and capitalism converge in something as deceptively ordinary as a humble pair of shoes.

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New Exhibit

In Slavery's Wake: Making Black Freedom in the World
National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC
December 2024 through June 2025

Description from the Museum:

From the mid-19th century until World War I, European colonization and African resistance spurred massive displacement and the capture and sale of vulnerable people across Western Africa. Marème Diarra was swept up in the wake of that instability. Captured in Mali and enslaved in Mauritania, she bravely escaped slavery with her three children. They trekked over 200 miles to the French colonial city of Saint-Louis, Senegal, where slavery was legally abolished. Diarra settled in Diel Mbam, a haven for newcomers whose rights remained restricted in Saint-Louis.

A dynamic mix of history, art, and media, "In Slavery's Wake" makes connections between Black freedom-makers across time and invites visitors into a global conversation on the continued impacts of slavery and colonialism. This multi-lingual exhibition experience features 100 objects, 250 images, and 10 multi-media interactives and films. "In Slavery's Wake" is a global curatorial project that explores, interrogates, and reframes the histories and legacies of slavery, colonialism, and freedom on an international scale. The project grew out of decade-long collaboration between international curators, scholars, and community members working to tell stories of slavery and colonialism in public spaces. Everyday people from around the world share stories of slavery, colonialism, memory, race, and place, through a new oral history archive called Unfinished Conversations. Their voices are featured throughout the gallery. Contemporary art is infused through the telling of this global history, from sonic landscapes to large-scale installations. Several artists have made new works of art for the exhibition, reclaiming lost histories, elevating silenced narratives, and intervening in the colonial visual archive." Learn more in our first international traveling exhibition, "In Slavery's Wake: Making Black Freedom in the World," on view through June 8, 2025.

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New Film

We Were Here -- The Untold History of Black Africans in Renaissance Europe
Do The Right Films, Screenings in 2024 and 2025

Description from the Producers:

The film is a groundbreaking documentary by Italian-Ghanaian and U.S. multi-hyphenate scholar and filmmaker Fred Kuwornu. This film is currently featured at the Central Pavilion of the 60th International Venice Biennale of Art, curated by Adriano Pedrosa, running until November 2024. This initiative can surely enrich our understanding of Renaissance art by uncovering overlooked narratives of diversity.

"We Were Here" unveils the untold history of Black Africans in Renaissance Europe through iconic artworks. This multilingual film, shot across Europe, challenges the notion that all Blacks were slaves or servants. It reveals a diverse presence, including princes, ambassadors, merchants, and religious figures. Narrated from an Afro-European perspective, it explores stories absent from traditional history books. The film interweaves art history with social narratives, offering a fresh lens on European Renaissance and the complex tapestry of Black presence often overlooked in conventional historical accounts.

In addition to being an excellent resource for analyzing the African slave trade in Europe, the film also explores exceptional stories of success, integration, and cultural influence. Filmed across Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, England, The Netherlands, and Brazil, this multilingual documentary features interviews with renowned Renaissance art historians who guide viewers through the works of celebrated painters, shedding light on the often-overlooked African presence in 15th-16th century Europe. By reinterpreting iconic paintings depicting Africans, the film uncovers untold stories of influential figures, such as ambassadors, princes, saints, and artists like Juan de Pareja. It offers valuable insights into the evolution of racial concepts since the 16th century, helping students understand both the historical and current context of Europe's Black population. This documentary serves as an invaluable resource for academic discussions on African contributions to European history and art.

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Book Review

Yesenia Barragan. Freedom's Captives: Slavery and Gradual Emancipation on the Colombian Black Pacific. Afro-Latin America Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 346 pp. ISBN 978-1108936361.

H-Net Book Review, published by H-Caribbean, https://networks.h-net.org/h-caribbean (November, 2024).

Reviewed for H-Caribbean by Philip Baltuskonis (Auburn University).

Yesenia Barragan's Freedom's Captives is an engrossing examination of the clash of liberalism and abolition in postindependence Colombia. The book explores the understudied region of the province of Chocó in the northern Colombian Pacific lowlands by focusing on how peoples of African descent navigated various forms of emancipation between 1821 and 1852, when slavery was completely abolished. Despite the attempt to destroy chattel slavery in the form of the Free Womb law in 1821, enslaved men, women, and children experienced thirty-one years of what Barragan refers to as the rule of gradual emancipation, a regime composed of self-purchase, the Free Womb provision, and state-backed manumissions. Rather than being deterred by the language of emancipation, slaveholders became more invested in slavery as they expanded their exploitation of young black people, or "Free Womb captives." The paradox of abolition and slaveholders' defiance is one of several paradoxes explored in this book. Barragan's work depicts Colombian lawmakers and intellectuals as being on the vanguard of abolition in the Atlantic. At the same time, Barragan underscores that the lived experiences of enslaved people reveal the limitations of a state-driven discourse on freedom. Yet, while enslaved families were affected by the limits of liberal freedom, they also impeded the state's "attempt to monopolize the meaning of freedom" by constructing their own versions of freedom (p. 281).

The book is organized into three parts. The first section explores the social and material conditions of free black and captive lowlanders in the Colombian Pacific. Part 2, the largest section of the book, analyzes the period of gradual emancipation rule through the debates over the formation of the Free Womb law, which stated that the children of enslaved mothers were born free but had to live with the mother's master until reaching adulthood. These chapters explore slaveholders' claims over Free Womb children and the challenges and revisions made to manumission in Colombia. Here Barragan links the debates over abolition to the emergence of a public sphere in the early republic, where interested parties across the nation engaged in a discourse on freedom and its limits. The last part examines the end of gradual emancipation rule with complete abolition, focusing on the gap between the aims of former slaveholders and the geography of the Colombian Pacific. While slaveholders tried to retain control over enslaved peoples after the abolition of slavery in 1852, Afro-Colombians enjoyed a great deal of autonomy in the social universe they constructed along the coastal frontier.

Barragan's work resituates Colombia's early republican period in two significant ways. First, her depiction of gradual emancipation rule emphasizes that ending slavery was central to Colombian nation-building efforts. This is not a book about the struggles between liberals and conservatives. Rather, this book spotlights the tension between Colombian statesmen and slaveholders' attempts to control freedom and the everyday lives of Afro-Colombians in the rural lowlands of the Pacific coast as evidence of the uncertainty surrounding the end of slavery. Statesmen became consumed by the abolition question in their pursuit of republican government. According to Colombian officials, immediate and complete abolition posed too many challenges. Instead, the new republic pursued policies like the vagrancy laws of 1836 to ensure that black captives were "doing ‘their part' to construct" a modern Colombia, policies that straddled the line between continuity of slaveholder power and a path to freedom enabled by white generosity (p. 198). Yet Barragan's depiction of Chocó shows that black captives challenged ambitions to control their bodies and labor. Black experiences in the lowlands varied greatly. Bogas (black rowers) functioned as the "gatekeepers" of Chocó's extensive river network because it was through their knowledge and skill that travelers and goods could traverse the waterways (p. 44). On the other hand, enslaved women navigated violent and sexually charged encounters with foreigners and slaveowners, all while turning to gathering gold to accumulate wealth to purchase freedom. While Barragan is less interested in questions of citizenship, her depiction of black autonomy in Chocó is nonetheless attentive to the idea of competing understandings of freedom. The tension between the regulation of freedom and the everyday lives of black lowlanders underscores how central the years of gradual emancipation rule were to Colombia's early history.

Second, the book situates Colombia's pursuit of abolition in an Atlantic context. Barragan's comparative lens depicts Colombia as deeply connected to an Atlantic discourse on emancipation and abolition. That alone sets her book apart as Colombia's history of abolition is conventionally started at the time of complete abolition in 1852, and not before. Her examination of the language surrounding abolition advances a compelling argument for understanding abolition as a process, in terms of both how abolition was regulated and how it was experienced. Gradual emancipation laws in Colombia not only transformed chattel slavery within the nation but also provided white lawmakers across the Atlantic with a blueprint on confronting the abolition question. Before they produced the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, British lawmakers in the 1820s and 1830s "looked to Colombia's example in crafting its own gradual emancipation law" (p. 189). Her emphasis on Atlantic connections underscores the shared anxieties surrounding the emancipation process and draws attention to gradual emancipation laws as being crucial to understanding the history of slavery and black experiences. Her comparative lens is informed by her impressive command of recent works in numerous fields. In dialogue with relevant historiography produced across the Americas, Barragan has created a work that broadens narratives on the emergence of racial- ized regimes in early modern nation-states to include Colombia, and Latin America more generally.

Scholars of the African diaspora, Latin Amer- ican nation-building, and abolition and the At- lantic will find this text extremely useful. Her claims about the place of gradual emancipation in understanding the early nineteenth century provide an excellent bridge in conceptualizing the impact of the end of colonial rule and the start of new republics. Barragan's fluid writing combined with her ability to ease nonspecialists into place and period makes this a highly readable and as- signable book in a graduate seminar or upper-level undergraduate course.

[Citation: Philip Baltuskonis. Review of Barragan, Yesenia, Freedom's Captives: Slavery and Gradual Emancipation on the Colombian Black Pacific. H-Caribbean, H-Net Reviews. November, 2024. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes.]

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