Black Atlantic – serie

The autobiography of Olaudah Equiano, a prominent African in late 18th-century Britain, is quoted, anthologized and interpreted in dozens of books and articles. More than any single contemporary, Equiano speaks for the fate of millions of Africans in the era of the transatlantic slave trade. This study attempts to create a rounded portrait of the man behind the literary image, and to study Equiano in the context of Atlantic slavery.

This group of essays, resulting from research affiliated with the UNESCO Slave Route Project, explores trans-Atlantic linkages and cultural overlays during the era of slavery and after. The essays concentrate on ethnicity and culture and their manifestations on both sides of the Atlantic and draw on new methodologies and new sources relating to the emergence of the African diaspora, one of the most historical phenomena of the modern era. In exploring the cultural impact of the slave trade in Africa and the Americas, these essays contend that complex, intercontinental forces shaped the African diaspora; the repercussions being felt on both sides of the Atlantic. Rather than considering the Atlantic a barrier, crossed in one direction only, the trans-Atlantic dimensions of slaving revealed here involved a degree of interaction that requires a careful reconsideration of patterns of resistance and accommodation, allowing for an examination of the expectations of the enslaved as well as analysis of the experience of slavery.Personal experience, memory and tradition kept alive cultural forms and expressions, whether through music, poetry or other means. The encounters forced on the ensl

*Broad-based survey of trans-Atlantic black culture*Newest book in the popular Black Atlantic seriesRadical Narratives of the Black Atlantic is a multi-faceted and interdisciplinary take on trans-Atlantic black culture. Alan Rice engages fully with Paul Gilroy's paradigm of the Black Atlantic through examination of a broad array of cultural genres including music, dance, folklore and oral literature, fine art, material culture, film and literature. The aspects of black culture under discussion range from black British gravesites to sea shanties, from the novels of Toni Morrison to the paintings of the Zanzibar born black British artist Lubaina Himid and from King Kong to the travels of Frederick Douglass and Paul Robeson. The book places such figures as the African American traveller and Barbary slave narrator Robert Adams and the West Indian slave narrator Mary Prince in a Black Atlantic context that explicates them fully. A chapter on the Titanic disaster shows how diasporan Africans composed oral poems about the disaster to criticise the discriminatory practices of its owners and racial imperialism.Overall, the book argues for the crucial importance of Black Atlantic cultures in the formation of our modern world. Moreover, it argues that looking at Black culture and history through a national lens is distorting and reductive.