West Central Africans in the Diaspora
* What were the connections between the longer histories of West Central Africa, especially today's Angola, and Brazil?
* What distinguished West Central Africans from West Africans in Brazil? (Check Lauderdale Graham's article and also the 'Nago and Mina' pieces from last week on the Yoruba)
* What was the role of West Central Africans in religious practices, warfare, and ideas about space and landscape?
* What methods have historians used to uncover West Central Africans' cultural lives? How successful are they and what are their limitations?
Core reading (choose 2 if possible; if not, at least 1!)
Mariana P Candido, (CUP 2013): "Introduction," pp. 1-30.
Aisha Finch, , chapter 7, "African Cuban Traditions and the Making of an Insurgency"
Robert Slenes, in Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora, CUP 2009.
Ras Michael Brown,, ch. 1: "Place, Culture, and Power"
Further reading
Heywood, Linda, ed., . CUP 2009 [a key resource: all the essays in sections 1 on Africa and 2 on Brazil, and essays by Landers, McGaffey, and Desch-Obi are very useful for essays and wider research]
Robert Slenes, , eds. Ericka A. Albaugh and Kathryn M de Luna (OUP, 2018)
Luis Felipe Alencastro, (Binghampton, SUNY 2018)
Various primary source extracts in: Stubbs, Jean, and Pedro Perez Sarduy,, 1993, part 2.
Jose Lingna Nafafe, , CUP 2022
Mariana Candido,
John Thornton, " Journal of World History 4:2 (Fall 1993): 181-214 [and Thornton has written widely about the history of Kongo more generally]
fantastic resources on African kingdoms, including Oyo and Dahomey as well as Kongo (including a whole A-level syllabus!)
Toby Green, . Allen Lane, 2019
Joseph Miller, University of Wisconsin Press, 1988.
Todd Ochoa, . University of California Press 2010.
Gomez, Michael , chapter 6 on West Central Africans in the US South
Miguel Barnet, The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave (testimony by former enslaved man Esteban Montejo in 1960s Cuba; contains descriptions of palo rituals)