Gold Coast Diasporas

Walter C. Rucker

Description

Although they came from distinct polities and peoples who spoke different languages, slaves from the African Gold Coast were collectively identified by Europeans as "Coromantee" or "Mina." Why these ethnic labels were embraced and how they were utilized by enslaved Africans to develop new group identities is the subject of Walter C. Rucker's absorbing study. Rucker examines the social and political factors that contributed to the creation of New World ethnic identities and assesses the ways displaced Gold Coast Africans used familiar ideas about power as a means of understanding, defining, and resisting oppression. He explains how performing Coromantee and Mina identity involved a common set of concerns and the creation of the ideological weapons necessary to resist the slavocracy. These weapons included obeah powders, charms, and potions; the evolution of "peasant" consciousness and the ennoblement of common people; increasingly aggressive displays of masculinity; and the empowerment of women as leaders, spiritualists, and warriors, all of which marked sharp breaks or reformulations of patterns in their Gold Coast past.

Introduction
Part One: Social Life and Death
1. Gold Coast Backgrounds
2. Making the Gold Coast Diaspora
3. Slavery, Ethnogenesis, and Social Resurrection
Part Two: Social Resurrection and Empowerment
4. State, Governance, and War
5. Obeah, Oaths, and Ancestral Spirits
6. Women, Regeneration, and Power
Postscript
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• History
• American
• Central
• History of the Americas
• Americas
• South
• Ethnic studies
• América
• Histoire

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 28 septembre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253017017
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

GOLD COAST DIASPORAS
BLACKS IN THE DIASPORA
EDITORS
Herman L. Bennett Kim D. Butler Judith A. Byfield Tracy Sharpley-Whiting
GOLD COAST DIASPORAS
IDENTITY, CULTURE, AND POWER
WALTER C. RUCKER
This book is a publication of
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2015 by Walter C. Rucker All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z 39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress .
ISBN 978-0-253-01694-2 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-253-01701-7 (ebook)
1 2 3 4 5 20 19 18 17 16 15
For Bayo, Na eem, and our new shining light, Ayinde .
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART 1. SOCIAL LIFE AND DEATH
1 Gold Coast Backgrounds
2 Making the Gold Coast Diaspora
3 Slavery, Ethnogenesis, and Social Resurrection
PART 2. SOCIAL RESURRECTION AND EMPOWERMENT
4 State, Governance, and War
5 Obeah, Oaths, and Ancestral Spirits
6 Women, Regeneration, and Power
Postscript
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Over the long, winding, and sometimes meandering transatlantic path I took in completing this project, a series of four watershed moments helped to anchor my thoughts and interpretations and facilitated my scholarly rebirth as an early-modern Black Atlantic specialist. The first moment occurred during a panel at the 1999 American Historical Association meeting in Washington, D.C. Rosalyn Terborg-Penn s helpful challenge to me then, not to forget about women in my historical analyses, played a shaping role in the interpretive directions I have taken since the publication of my first book. A year later, at the inaugural Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD) meeting in New York, Kim Butler s public praise of my embryonic work on slave resistance and culture in antebellum South Carolina was the second moment. The third moment happened as I reversed the middle passage in a very personal way during my first visit to Ghana in the summer of 2002. Facilitated by a good colleague-Leon Caldwell-as well as funding from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) and a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend, my trip to and through Ghana provided a Black Atlantic frame for my evolving understandings of Atlantic history, cultural change, memory, and trauma. The fourth and final moment-pivotal in my reincarnation as an early-modern Black Atlantic historian-was the 2009 ASWAD conference in Accra, Ghana, where I presented my first paper on this project.
This book owes debts, of a variety of sorts, to several people. First and foremost, a small group of colleagues and friends whom I hold in the highest esteem-all are also the smartest people I know-provided support, much-needed and timely criticism, and platforms upon which I could safely try out new ideas. This cadre includes Leslie Alexander, Jason Young, and Bayo Holsey. In addition, I am fortunate to be part of a group of Morehouse College alumni who all earned history Ph.D.s between 1996 and 2002 and who are tenured at a range of universities across the United States and the world. The Morehouse Scholars Collective, including Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Jason Young, Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Fanon Che Wilkins, Charles McKinney, David Canton, and Frederick Knight, helped shape every step I have taken in becoming a historian and a published scholar. Ogbar encouraged my shift in major from computer science to history in 1990. Two others, Young and Knight, were graduate student colleagues with me in Riverside, California. Jeffries was a close colleague and friend during my eight years at the Ohio State University (OSU). Finally, McKinney, Wilkins, Canton, and Ogbar were role models and mentors-the veritable elders of the cohort. Within our collective are multiple department chairs and program directors, a vice provost, and authors and editors of more than a dozen books. Steadfast, honest, true, and, yes, we plan to take over black academe.
Graduate students enrolled in a range of readings courses and seminars at OSU-Comparative History of the African Diaspora, Black Atlantic Communities and Cultures, Seminar in West African Society and Culture, and Slavery in Comparative Context-allowed me to assign books I needed to read in preparation for this project. We also had dozens of stimulating discussions about historiographic, historical, and theoretical matters that, in the end, facilitated my fluency in Black Atlantic studies. Through brief chats, words of encouragement, questions after presentations and invited talks, and emails, this project benefited from the support and collective wisdom of a range of scholars, including Ray Kea, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, John Thornton, Mike Gomez, Rebecca Shumway, Vincent Brown, Rosanne Adderly, Mia Bay, Herman Bennett, Carolyn Brown, Margaret Washington, Jim Sweet, Ahmad Sikainga, Alton Hornsby, Jr., Marcellus Barksdale, Deborah Gray White, Ann Fabian, Jemima Pierre, Peter Hudson, Heather Williams, Bill Ferris, Amrita Myers, Ousman Kobo, Lisa Lindsay, Fatimah Jackson, Judson Jeffries, Lupenga Mphande, Franco Barchiesi, Jerma Jackson, Genna Rae McNeil, Ike Newsum, Michael Lambert, the late Nick Nelson, Linda Myers, Curtis Austin, Andrea Davis, Julius Nyang oro, Bereket Selassie, Ken Goings, Kenneth Janken, and Akinyele Umoja. I am thankful especially for the generosity of John Thornton, who shared with me translations of Dutch documents related to Gold Coast history and the transatlantic slave trade. I also owe debts that I may never be able to repay properly to the two anonymous readers; to Herman Bennett and other editors of the Blacks in the Diaspora series; and to Bob Sloan, Jenna Whittaker, and Darja Malcolm-Clarke at Indiana University Press. I have had many experiences with university and academic presses over the years, but none surpass the care, attention to detail, and professionalism of the editorial and production staff at Indiana.
I extend special thanks to UNL, the National Endowment for the Humanities, OSU, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) for grant funding and a research leave I received to support this project. Financial support from the Research Council and the Layman Trust (UNL); three Arts and Humanities Grants and a 2010-2011 research leave (OSU); and funding from the University Research Council, the Institute for African American Research, and the Department of African, African American, and Diaspora Studies (UNC) made possible a series of research trips to Barbados, Trinidad, Ghana, the UK, New York, and Louisiana. The staffs of the following libraries and archives were particularly helpful: the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University, the Pointe Coupee Parish Courthouse, the New-York Historical Society, the New York Public Library, the Southern Historical Collection, the Barbados Museum and Historical Society, Balme Library Special Collections at the University of Ghana-Legon, the National Archives at Kew, Lambeth Palace Library, Oxford University s Bodleian Library, and the British Library.
Though the 2009 ASWAD meeting in Accra represents a moment in my reinvention as a Black Atlantic specialist, it was also the venue at which I met my partner, Bayo Holsey. Her keen intellect and supreme patience shaped this book in immeasurable ways. For the gifts of love, laughter, and new life, I dedicate this book to her.
GOLD COAST DIASPORAS
Introduction
The tribe of the Middle Passage . . . was the tribe created by the rapacity of African elites, the territorial expansion of strong states, and the greed, cruelty, and arrogance of white men possessing the world. It was the tribe of those stolen from their natal land, stripped of their country marks, and severed from their kin.
SAIDIYA HARTMAN, LOSE YOUR MOTHER (2007)
Private Don Juan s military discharge on July 10, 1846, was nothing more than a routine matter at the time. After twenty-two years of distinguished service in Her Majesty s 2nd West India Regiment of Foot, the regimental board and the surgeon appointed to inspect his physical and mental condition deemed Don Juan unfit for further service, ending his career as a soldier at the age of forty. Wellington Poole, the assistant surgeon in medical charge of the regiment, certified him as permanently disabled because he had been worn out. Suffering from chronic rheumatism and having survived well beyond the life expectancy of black laborers in the nineteenth-century British Caribbean, Don Juan had outlived his usefulness. Extolled by his commanding officers as a good Soldier . . . trustworthy sober who rarely visited a hospital, never complained about work or injury, nor took time off duty, Don Juan more than paid back the British Crown for his 1824 release from bondage. 1
When he agreed to join the 2nd West India Regiment, Don Juan claimed to be from Coromantee in Africa. This reported place of origin refers to two Fante-speaking towns, Upper and Lower Kormantse, and a nearby trading factory in Atlantic Africa s Gold Coast-a region coterminous with modern-day Ghana. Don Juan s claim to a Coromantee