ABSTRACT

Ripped from motherland and family, ethnically mixed to quell the potential of uprisings, and brutalized by regimes of hard labor, the heart - the spirit - of Africa did not stop beating in the New World. Rather, it survived and has re-emerged; changed by contacts with new cultures and environments, but still part of the continuum of African tradition: an African Re-Genesis. This is the first volume in its field to emphasize the interdisciplinary temporal and geographic comparative research of Archaeology, Anthropology, History and Linguistics to allow us to form unique perspectives on broader trends in the transformation and (re-) emergence of African Diaspora cultures. African Re-Genesis confirms that regardless of discipline, from continental Africa to Europe, the Western Hemisphere and Indian Ocean, all Diaspora research requires a relevance to modern communities and sensitivity to the interplay with contemporary cultural identities. Matters concerning race and cultural diversity, though ostensibly de-fused by the vocabulary of political correctness, remain contentious. Indeed, the topic of racial relations has become to the twenty-first century what sex was to the nineteenth century - something best not discussed in public, and better talked around than confronted directly. African Re-Genesis strikes at the nerve of urgency that the past, present and future globalization of African cultures, is a cornerstone of the entire human experience, and it thus deserves recognition as such.

part I|43 pages

Heritage and contemporary identities

chapter 2|11 pages

Contested monuments

African-Americans and the commoditization of Ghana's slave castles

chapter 3|12 pages

Back to Africa

Issues of hosting “Roots” tourism in West Afnca

chapter 5|12 pages

Historiographical issues in the African Diaspora experience in the New World

Re-examining the “Slave Culture” and “Creole Culture” theses

part II|70 pages

Historical and anthropological perspectives

chapter 7|8 pages

Putting flesh on the bones

History—Anthropology collaboration on the New York City African Burial Ground Project

chapter 8|20 pages

All the documents are destroyed!

Documenting slavery for St Eustatius, Netherlands Antilles

chapter 9|16 pages

Identity and the mirage of ethnicity

Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua's journey in the Americas

chapter 10|5 pages

Banya

A Suriname slave play that survived

chapter 11|10 pages

Constructing identity through Inter-Caribbean interactions

The Curaçao—Cuban migration revisited

part III|114 pages

Archaeology and living communities

chapter 13|15 pages

East End maritime traders

The emergence of a Creole community on St John, Danish West Indies

chapter 14|16 pages

Hawking your wares

Determining the scale of informal economy through the distribution of local coarse earthenware in eighteenth-century famaica

chapter 17|13 pages

The Other Side of Freedom

The Maroon trail in Suriname

chapter 18|19 pages

Bantu elements in Palenque (Colombia)

Anthropological, archaeological and linguistic evidence

chapter 19|12 pages

Medium vessels and the Longue Dureé

The endurance of ritual ceramics and the archaeology of the African Diaspora

part IV|34 pages

Slavery in Africa

chapter 21|23 pages

Toward an archaeology of the other African diaspora

The slave trade and dispersed Africans in the western Indian Ocean