Review Essay: Surviving Slavery,Forging Freedom

See esp. Eugene D. Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage, 1976); Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

Alex Bontemps , The Punished Self: Surviving Slavery in the Colonial South ( Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2001).

Edward Kamau Brathwaite , "Commentary Three," in Roots and Branches: Current Directions in Slave Studies, ed. Michael Craton (Toronto: Pergamon Press, 1979), 150.

Gwendolyn Midlo Hall , Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995).

Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (Boston: Beacon Press, 1976); Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Wyatt MacGaffey, Religion and Society in Central Africa: The Bakongo of Lower Zaire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Robert Farris Thompson, African Art in Motion: Icon and Act (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974); The Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Vintage, 1983); Stuckey, Slave Culture.

On opposition and resistance, see the discussion in Richard D. E. Burton, Afro-Creole: Power, Opposition, and Play in the Caribbean (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997).

Eric Lott, Love and Theft : Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

Shane White and Graham White, Stylin': African American Expressive Culture, From Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit (Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press, 1999); Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Nellie Y. McKay, eds., The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1997).

Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Houston A. Baker, Jr., Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

Frederick Douglass , My Bondage and My Freedom ( New York: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1855).

Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia's Black Community, 1720-1840 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press , 1991).

Gates, Jr. , and McKay , eds., Norton Anthology of African American Literature , 766-67.

See, for instance, Mark M. Smith, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); and Smith's more recent How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: Secker & Warburg, 1964), 115; Ira Berlin, "Time, Space, and the Evolution of Afro-American Society on British Mainland North America," American Historical Review 85 (1980): 44-78; Richard Cullen Rath, How Early America Sounded (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003), x. See also Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998) and Generations of Captivity: A History of African American Slaves (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

Peter Charles Hoffer, Sensory Worlds in Early America (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2003), viii; Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Paul Gilroy, Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Culture (London: Serpent's Tail, 1993), 37; Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003); Mikhail Bakhtin quoted in Carol Emerson and Michael Holquist, eds., Speech Genres (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 2.