Atlantic Migrations and the African Diaspora – serie

The turn of the twentieth century was an extraordinarily difficult period for African Americans, a time of unchecked lynchings, mob attacks, and rampant Jim Crow segregation. During these bleak years, Emma Crawford, a young African American woman living in Pennsylvania, corresponded by postcard with friends and family members and collected the cards she received from all over the country. Her album—spanning from 1906 to 1910 and analyzed in Emma's Postcard Album—becomes an entry point into a deeply textured understanding of the nuances and complexities of African American lives and the survival strategies that enabled people "to make a way from no way." As snippets of lived experience, eye-catching visual images, and reflections of historical moments, the cards in the collection become sources for understanding not only African American life, but also broader American history and culture. In Emma's Postcard Album, Faith Mitchell innovatively places the contents of this postcard collection into specific historic and biographical contexts and provides a new interpretation of postcards as life writings, a much-neglected aspect of scholarship. Through these techniques, a riveting world we know far too little about is revealed, and we gain new insights into the perspectives and experience of African Americans—in their own words. Capping off these contributions, the text is a visual feast, illustrated with arresting images from the Golden Age of postcards as well as newspaper clippings and other archival material.

Memories of Africa: Home and Abroad in the United States suggests a new lens for viewing African diaspora studies: the experiences of African memoirists who live in the United States. The book shows how African diaspora memoirs beautifully and grippingly depict the experiences of African migrants over time through political, social, and cultural spheres. In reading African diaspora memoirs from the transatlantic slave trade period to the present, a reader can understand the complexity of the African migrant legacy and evolution.Author Toyin Falola argues that memoirs are significant not only in their interpretation of events conveyed by the memoirists but also in demonstrating how interpersonal and human the stories told can be. Memoirs are powerful because they are emotionally captivating and because important themes and events circulate around a particular person (in this case, the memoirist). Undoubtedly, a memoir is significant because it can teach anyone about a part of the human experience, even if the "facts" are not described without bias. Through this sort of narrative, the reader cannot help but enter into the memoirist’s mind and, therefore, feel more empathy for them. In doing so, the reader can "feel" what the memoirist feels and "see" what the memoirist sees as clearly as is humanly possible. In this way, the historical events and life lessons become tangible and poignantly real to the reader.

Memories of Africa: Home and Abroad in the United States suggests a new lens for viewing African diaspora studies: the experiences of African memoirists who live in the United States. The book shows how African diaspora memoirs beautifully and grippingly depict the experiences of African migrants over time through political, social, and cultural spheres. In reading African diaspora memoirs from the transatlantic slave trade period to the present, a reader can understand the complexity of the African migrant legacy and evolution.Author Toyin Falola argues that memoirs are significant not only in their interpretation of events conveyed by the memoirists but also in demonstrating how interpersonal and human the stories told can be. Memoirs are powerful because they are emotionally captivating and because important themes and events circulate around a particular person (in this case, the memoirist). Undoubtedly, a memoir is significant because it can teach anyone about a part of the human experience, even if the "facts" are not described without bias. Through this sort of narrative, the reader cannot help but enter into the memoirist’s mind and, therefore, feel more empathy for them. In doing so, the reader can "feel" what the memoirist feels and "see" what the memoirist sees as clearly as is humanly possible. In this way, the historical events and life lessons become tangible and poignantly real to the reader.

In the midst of calls for the removal of Confederate monuments across the South, tens of thousands of museums, buildings, and other historical sites currently comprise a tourist infrastructure of the southern heritage industry. Louisiana, one of the most prominent and frequently visited states that benefit from this tourism, has more than sixty heritage sites housed in former slave plantations. These sites contain the remains, restorations, reconstructions, and replicas of antebellum slave cabins and slave quarters. In the Shadows of the Big House: Twenty-First-Century Antebellum Slave Cabins and Heritage Tourism in Louisiana is the first book to tackle the role, treatment, and representation of slave cabins at plantation museum sites in contemporary heritage tourism.In this volume, author Stephen Small describes and analyzes sixteen twenty-first-century antebellum slave cabins currently located on three plantation museum sites in Natchitoches, Louisiana: Oakland Plantation, Magnolia Plantation Complex, and Melrose Plantation. Small traces the historical trajectory of plantations and slave cabins since the Civil War and explores what representations of slavery and slave cabins in these sites convey about the reconfiguration of the past and the rearticulation of history in the present. Considering such themes as the role of white ethnic identity in representations of elite whites and the extent and significance of Black voices and Black visions of representations of these plantations, Small asks what these sites reveal about social forgetting and social remembering throughout Louisiana and the South. He further explores the ways that gender structures the social organization of current sites and the role and influence of the state in the social organization and representations that prevail today.

In the midst of calls for the removal of Confederate monuments across the South, tens of thousands of museums, buildings, and other historical sites currently comprise a tourist infrastructure of the southern heritage industry. Louisiana, one of the most prominent and frequently visited states that benefit from this tourism, has more than sixty heritage sites housed in former slave plantations. These sites contain the remains, restorations, reconstructions, and replicas of antebellum slave cabins and slave quarters. In the Shadows of the Big House: Twenty-First-Century Antebellum Slave Cabins and Heritage Tourism in Louisiana is the first book to tackle the role, treatment, and representation of slave cabins at plantation museum sites in contemporary heritage tourism.In this volume, author Stephen Small describes and analyzes sixteen twenty-first-century antebellum slave cabins currently located on three plantation museum sites in Natchitoches, Louisiana: Oakland Plantation, Magnolia Plantation Complex, and Melrose Plantation. Small traces the historical trajectory of plantations and slave cabins since the Civil War and explores what representations of slavery and slave cabins in these sites convey about the reconfiguration of the past and the rearticulation of history in the present. Considering such themes as the role of white ethnic identity in representations of elite whites and the extent and significance of Black voices and Black visions of representations of these plantations, Small asks what these sites reveal about social forgetting and social remembering throughout Louisiana and the South. He further explores the ways that gender structures the social organization of current sites and the role and influence of the state in the social organization and representations that prevail today.

Opened in 1907 in Shreveport, Louisiana, by Lizzetta LeFalle-Collins’s grandfather, Black dairy farmer Angus Bates, Lakeside Dairy was a rarity in the post-Reconstruction South. The dairy thrived despite the time's challenging, racially oppressive, and hostile social and political climate. While Lakeside Dairy closed in 1943, Angus’s life and work legacy echoed through the Bates family for generations. Author LeFalle-Collins structures her narrative around familial creative storytelling heard as a child, supported by family ephemera about the dairy and the family’s social and community engagement. These documents directed her historical research as Seasons at Lakeside Dairy tracks life on the farm through the year, showing how the family worked, lived, and cooked and how they made a sustainable living in a climate of pervasive racism. Survival in the farming community was mainly due to the influence of George Washington Carver, who disseminated innovative recommendations for farmers, and Booker T. Washington, who advocated for Black entrepreneurs to remain and rebuild the South to make it their own. Angus Bates passed in 1935, and his spouse Carrie D. Bates, who had always been the dairy's partner and financial manager, rebranded the dairy in her name with her sons until closing. Realizing Shreveport held few opportunities for her children, she encouraged them to move west, a migratory route followed by many Black Louisianans.Family members’ voices are interwoven into each chapter with direct quotations, creative storytelling, historical contexts, ephemera, and healthier recipes based on family favorites. Seasons at Lakeside Dairy offers unique insight into their persistence, sustainability, self-sufficiency, and joy. Migration tales also open a window into the complex history of race and identity, continuing as they became homeowners in the West.