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S'està carregant… Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Centuryde Gwendolyn Midlo Hall
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Apunta't a LibraryThing per saber si aquest llibre et pot agradar. No hi ha cap discussió a Converses sobre aquesta obra. A wonderful work, although there are some problems with her methodology. First, the overall impression of the book is that Africans have a wonderful culture and the French had a horrid one. Second, she beats her argument like it was a dead horse. Two or three examples are plenty - not fifteen. Third, she makes a few jumps. Besides that, she has done an amazing job with the records of slavers and describes what truly is an oddity in the New World slave economies: Louisiana. Sense ressenyes | afegeix-hi una ressenya
"Although a number of important studies of American slavery have explored the formation of slave cultures in the English colonies, no book until now has undertaken a comprehensive assessment of the development of the distinctive Afro-Creole culture of colonial Louisiana. This culture, based upon a separate language community with its own folkloric, musical, religious, and historical traditions, was created by slaves brought directly from Africa to Louisiana before 1731. It still survives as the acknowledged cultural heritage of tens of thousands of people of all races in the southern part of the state."--BOOK JACKET. "In this pathbreaking work, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall studies Louisiana's creole slave community during the eighteenth century, focusing on the slaves' African origins, the evolution of their own language and culture, and the role they played in the formation of the broader society, economy, and culture of the region. Hall bases her study on research in a wide range of archival sources in Louisiana, France, and Spain and employs several disciplines--history, anthropology, linguistics, and folklore--in her analysis. Among the topics she considers are the French slave trade from Africa to Louisiana, the ethnic origins of the slaves, and relations between African slaves and native Indians. She gives special consideration to race mixture between Africans, Indians, and whites; to the role of slaves in the Natchez Uprising of 1729; to slave unrest and conspiracies, including the Pointe Coupee conspiracies of 1791 and 1795; and to the development of communities of runaway slaves in the cypress swamps around New Orleans. Hall's text is enhanced by a number of tables, graphs, maps, and illustrations."--BOOK JACKET. "Hall attributes the exceptional vitality of Louisiana's creole slave communities to several factors: the large size of the African population relative to the white population; the importation of slaves directly from Africa; the enduring strength of African cultural features in the slave community; and the proximity of wilderness areas that permitted the establishment and long-term survival of maroon communities."--BOOK JACKET. "The result of many years of research and writing, Hall's book makes a unique and important contribution to the literature on colonial Louisiana and to the history of slavery and of African-American cultures."--Jacket. No s'han trobat descripcions de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — S'està carregant… GèneresClassificació Decimal de Dewey (DDC)976.3History and Geography North America South Central U.S. LouisianaLCC (Clas. Bibl. Congrés EUA)ValoracióMitjana:
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Hall writes, “In French Louisiana, usefulness was the overriding virtue for immigrants, transcending race, nation, humanity, and any other consideration” (pg. 6-7). Further, “Both the proportions of particular African nations present in early Louisiana and the conditions in Africa, as well as in Louisiana, molded the formation of Afro-Creole culture” (pg. 31). To this end, Hall offers extensive demographic evidence in tracking the development of creole populations. She further argues, “The survival of French Louisiana was due not only to African labor but also to African technology. The introduction from Africa of rice seeds and of slaves who knew how to cultivate rice assured the only reliable food crop that could be grown in the swamplands in and around New Orleans” (pg. 121). Additionally, “The Africans arrived in an extremely fluid society where a socio-racial hierarchy was ill defined and hard to enforce” (pg. 128). Hall cautions, “French New Orleans was a brutal, violent place. But it cannot be understood by projecting contemporary attitudes toward race backward in time. There is no evidence of the racial exclusiveness and contempt that characterizes more recent times” (pg. 155).
Hall writes, “After the United States took over Louisiana, creole cultural identification became a means of distinguishing that which was truly native to Louisiana from that which was Anglo. Creole has come to mean the language and the folk culture that was native to the southern part of Louisiana where African, French, and Spanish influence was most deeply rooted historically and culturally” (pg. 157). She continues, “The debt that poor whites of Louisiana owe to the maroon communities of the eighteenth century is engraved on the language they still speak today. The Cajuns and the Canary Islanders, poverty-stricken immigrants who came to Louisiana during the last half of the eighteenth century, had to learn to adapt to the swamps, an environment that was totally foreign to them. The ancestors of the fiercely defiant and independent people who live in the swamps of Louisiana learned to survive, physically and economically, from the runaway slaves who first sought refuge there” (pg. 236).
Following the Spanish takeover of New Orleans, Hall writes, “There is no doubt that Africans were, by far, the largest group of people introduced into Spanish Louisiana” (pg. 277). She continues, “The cultural impact of the Africans introduced into Spanish Louisiana was magnified by conditions prevailing in the colony. While it has become a truism that masters separated slaves who were from the same African nations, in Pointe Coupee, slaves from the same nations and/or who spoke mutually intelligible languages were often clustered on the same estates” (pg. 293-294). While violence continued, Hall writes, “The tradition of violence and brutality did not, however, include hysteria about the purity of white womanhood and paranoic fears about the rape of white women by black men” (pg. 313).
Hall concludes, “The Point Coupee Conspiracy of 1795 was a turning point in the attitude toward slave control in Louisiana” (pg. 376). In this event, “The slaves proved themselves to be both competent and indomitable. The semi-egalitarian tradition among masters and salves born on the insecure frontier gave way to systematic, preventative terror” (pg. 376). ( )