ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book demonstrates that there are many gray areas and complexities regarding slavery and African-American culture not easily reduced to sound-bites or paragraphs on explanatory panels. To better appreciate the coping strategies of Africans in the New World, people need to understand both the local mix of African ethnicities and the nature of the exterior communities with which they were able to interact. Osei-Tutu and Handley both deal with how a burgeoning African-American tourist trade in coastal West Africa is confronting continental African attitudes and heritage priorities. The ethno archaeological and historical archaeological work of Kelly and Norman provides an admirable example of how well-informed research on contemporary and historic material culture can have double relevance to Africanists and "Diasporists". The path breaking research of Brandt gives perspective to the truly global scale of the dispersion of Africans and elements of African cultures during the second millennium ad.
