Echoes of History: Legacies of the Benin Bronzes and Restitution Within the Black Atlantic

Listening for Silences: The Trap of Biased Sources

Reviewed by: Slavery in the American Republic: Developing the Federal Government, 1791-1861 by David F. Ericson Richard R. John (bio) Keywords Slavery, Federal government, Politics, State development Slavery in the American Republic: Developing the Federal Government, 1791-1861. By David F. Ericson. (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2011. Pp. ix, 298. Cloth, $37.50.) The relationship of slavery and American politics is a historical perennial. In Slavery in the American Republic, political scientist David F. Ericson joins the discussion by emphasizing the positive role that the presence of slavery in the American republic played the development of the federal government. In the "traditional narrative," Ericson contends, slavery had little to do with the development of the American state, or, at most, slowed its rise (17). Ericson finds this narrative mistaken. The mordant warnings of slaveholders John Randolph and Nathanial Macon that federal public-works spending might establish precedents that could doom the "peculiar institution" were overblown and unrepresentative. More characteristic was the long involvement of the army in the Second Seminole War, a conflict that, in Ericson's view, was less about land hunger or anti-Native American prejudice than the elimination of a popular haven for escaped slaves. To make his point, Ericson proposes a number of counterfactuals that take the form of a syllogism: no slavery, less (federal) government. Ericson freely concedes that his linkage of slavery and federal public policy is not exactly novel. Indeed, it is not altogether obvious how many historians, as opposed to political scientists, he would lump together in the "traditional" category. Don E. Fehrenbacher's The Slaveholding Republic (Oxford, UK, 2001) covered many of the same topics with greater authority, while Robin E. Einhorn's American Taxation, American Slavery (Chicago, 2006) deftly probed the relationship of slavery [End Page 368] and federal taxation. Ericson's innovation, rather, is to demonstrate quantitatively that slavery hastened "state development," a term of art for political scientists that Ericson equates not with the capacity of the state to attain specific goals, as earlier political scientists contended, but, rather, with the ability of federal officeholders to operate independently of constituent pressure. Ericson opens his narrative in 1791, a convenient starting point, since it permits him to sidestep the vexed debate over the relationship of slavery to the federal Constitution. Following an opening chapter in which he distinguishes his approach from the various "politics and history" scholars (2) who persist in downplaying the power of the federal government in the early republic, Ericson devotes chapters to the cost of federal government involvement in the suppression of the international slave trade, the relocation of ex-slaves in Liberia, the capture of fugitive slaves, slavery-related military ventures, and the employment of slaves by the federal government. In the 1791-1861 period, Erickson contends, lawmakers devoted 2.8 percent of federal expenditures ($51 million) to slavery-related tasks. Of this total, over half—$30 million—went to the prosecution of the Second Seminole War, with an additional $10 million for Texas debt relief—an expenditure that he throws into the mix even though he is agnostic as to whether slaveholder-driven land hunger precipitated the Mexican-American War. While Ericson displays considerable ingenuity in number crunching, his interest extends beyond the merely quantitative. How, he asks, did the presence of slavery hasten changes in state behavior that "in turn" led to state development (16)? To answer this question, he ventures a number of speculative claims. Proslavery federal activism, Ericson posits, probably increased the legitimacy of the federal government in the slaveholding states; the hiring of slaves at the Norfolk, Virginia, navy yard almost certainly emboldened middle-level federal administrators to invent novel protocols that increased their autonomy vis à vis their superiors; and the frequent deployment of the military to defend slaveholders' property rights explains the "fit" between the trajectory of state development in the United States and Europe (106). The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 posed a special interpretative challenge, since it perversely underscored the integral relationship of slavery to the expanding mandate of the federal government in the realm of civil rights: "The federal enforcement of the constitutional rights of Southern slaveholders to the return of their...

The emergence of major Chinese economic and political stakes in Africa is arguably the most important process to have emerged on the African continent since the end of the Cold War. China is now Africa's second most important trading partner, behind the United States but ahead of France and the United Kingdom. Relations are a continuation of Sino‐African historical ties, propelled by China's desire to obtain new sources of raw materials and energy for its ongoing economic growth and new export markets for China‐based producers on the one hand, and African elites' initiatives to find a non‐Western option/leverage on the other hand. However, various commentators have misunderstood the nature of this expansion. It is common for observers to talk of either Chinese “colonization” of Africa, or of “China Inc.'s” venture into Africa. Both views are wide of the mark and reflect an ignorance of the dynamics underpinning the developing relationships between Chinese and African actors.

Reviewed by: Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States by Erin Austin Dwyer Laura McCoy (bio) Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States. By Erin Austin Dwyer. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. Pp. 320. Cloth, $39.95.) Erin Austin Dwyer’s intriguing new book brings together the histories of slavery and emotions to illuminate how Black and white southerners alike deployed emotions as “a currency of power” (3). Dwyer reads slave narratives alongside and against documents of enslavers to reconstruct people’s emotional lives. While it is never possible to know how other people truly felt, Dwyer analyzes the rhetoric used to discuss emotions, what emotions were expected of whom, motives for feigning or hiding specific emotions, and differences between emotional norms and actual emotional practices. In doing so, she uncovers “what people thought emotions could actually accomplish” (13)—in short, how power operated through emotions in both slavery and Emancipation. From the outset, Dwyer makes clear that the stakes of these affective politics were not even. For enslavers, deviating from emotional norms most commonly risked public scrutiny and potential loss of capital, while enslaved people “risked the whip, the auction block, or even death” (3). While historians of slavery have separately explored affective relations among the slaveholding class or enslaved communities, Dwyer considers affective relations between the two groups. This approach enables her to interrogate how individuals navigated power hierarchies through emotional expression and to convincingly contend that attending to emotions sharpens our understanding of how white southerners perpetuated and Black southerners resisted the politics of white supremacy during the years before and after the Civil War. The first chapter broadly explores how enslavers constructed their emotional lives and social identities through enslaved people and, in turn, how enslaved people could manipulate slave owners’ feelings and relationships to survive and resist enslavement. The second chapter explains how southerners learned the emotional politics of a society organized around slavery. Slaveholding parents actively taught their children how to master their own emotions and those of the people they enslaved. From enslaved adults, trickster tales, and the process of play, enslaved children learned how to mask sadness, read slaveholders’ emotions, and identify emotional allies—all affective strategies that could mean the difference between life and death. Together, these chapters emphasize that the emotional politics of slavery were socially constructed and thus intentionally reinforced or resisted. [End Page 246] The third and fourth chapters consider the rhetorical importance and literal commodification of emotions in a society dominated by market forces. For instance, members of the planter class linked the appearance of contentment to profitability, worrying that “sulky” slaves were poor workers and that crying or lashing out on the auction block depreciated an enslaved person’s value. Because trustworthiness had market value, enslaved people could strategically display honesty and loyalty to gain benefits like greater mobility. These chapters demonstrate how the market values of happiness and trust constrained enslaved people’s freedom of emotional expression while simultaneously providing opportunities for enslavers and enslaved people to negotiate their daily lives and material conditions. Chapters 5 and 6 explore the contours and consequences of affective discipline as a means of social control. Enslavers assumed the authority to coerce displays of desired emotions from enslaved people and punish them for expressing an emotion deemed inappropriate or threatening, such as grief or anger. The goal of affective discipline was not just to control enslaved people’s emotional expressions, but also to punish them for how they had made slaveholders feel. The final chapter examines Emancipation as “a seismic shift in the emotional terrain of the South” (162), in part because the planter class fretted over losing the power to affectively discipline Black people. Formerly enslaved people made clear that they believed being free meant the ability to pursue happiness and freely express emotions that had been restricted in bondage. Members of the planter class felt threatened by this emotional liberation and employed both legal and extralegal tactics to reassert the emotional hierarchies of slavery, especially the authority to control Black people’s emotions. The power of Mastering Emotions rests on Dwyer’s patient and nuanced readings of conflicting perspectives and...

Placing “New Africans” in the “Old” South Africa: Drama, Modernity, and Racial Identities in Johannesburg, circa 1935 Loren Kruger (bio) On Sunday, 3 June 1934, African artists and intellectuals, American Board Missionaries, liberal whites associated with the Joint European/African Council, and an educated, predominantly African audience gathered at the Bantu Men’s Social Centre (BMSC) in downtown Johannesburg for an Emancipation Centenary Celebration, commemorating the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834. 1 The Celebration included speeches by American missionaries and leading Africans, such as R. V. Selope Thema (editor of Bantu World) and A. B. Xuma (later President of the African National Congress [ANC]); performances of Handel’s Messiah; hymns composed by Europeans, Africans, and Americans; and “Negro spirituals.” It culminated in a “dramatic display,” the subject of which was not the emancipation of slaves in the Empire, but rather the lives of slaves in the United States. Incidental music was written by Reuben Caluza, known for composing and collecting Zulu folk-songs, and the text by his cousin Rolfes Dhlomo. The evening’s performances were organized and directed by Herbert Dhlomo, Rolfes’s brother and a dramatist in his own right. Drawing on the variety format of Edwardian pageants and the music hall, the performance also borrowed freely from the speeches of Lincoln and Frederick Douglass and the portrayal of the “life of the lowly” in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The “dramatic display” itself, including a slave auction, labor in the fields, and the coming of freedom performed by adults and children in chorus, highlighted the pathos of the [End Page 113] lot of both slaves and ex-slaves: “the suffering of the American Negroes on the slave market, in the cotton fields and at home, until the joyful news of the liberation”; 2 and the “feelings of joy and relief, which the right ending of the struggle for freedom had brought.” 3 Although these reports in Bantu World and Umteteli wa Bantu, the major African papers, give us no details about the music accompanying these scenes, it is likely, given Caluza’s international reputation as a composer of nationalist hymns and Zulu folksongs (recorded by His Master’s Voice in London in 1930), that it drew on his “sorrow songs” about the dispossession of South African blacks. 4 Likewise, the dramatic interpretations of key speeches such as the Gettysburg Address, delivered by Griffiths Motsieloa, leader of the minstrel troupe the Darktown Strutters, and the record company Gallophone’s answer to His Master’s Voice, probably resonated with the audience differently from the praise heaped on British and American emancipators in the African press. Politically charged as this event certainly was, it had nonetheless no single political meaning. Permitted by the neocolonial state and applauded by white liberal paternalists, it was enthusiastically received not only by the members of the BMSC but also by the more diverse—and more disaffected—audience at the Eastern Native Township performance. This occasion thus eludes the familiar dichotomy between white colonial hegemony and the oppressed black masses (or between high English culture and clearly identifiable working-class practices), a dichotomy that has long pervaded South African criticism and underlies key formulations of current postcolonial theory. 5 In this schema, members of the New African elite, the small intermediary class of clergymen, teachers, and other professionals who organized events such as the Emancipation Celebration, are distinguished above all by their attachment to European civilization and thus by their alienation from the masses of black people, whether this alienation is read as the irredeemable result of their colonial assimilation and distance from popular African cultural expression 6 or as a measure of the obstacles to their attempts at representing either African concerns in general or the interests of an emerging working class in particular. 7 This retrospective judgment carries some weight in present-day debates about South African cultural politics but it does not fully acknowledge the fluidity in 1934 of these class and ethnic affiliations, or the volatility of New African identification with “European civilization.” To be sure, the editor of Bantu World joined the American Board Mission in urging his readers to beware of the unChristian tactics of the...

The purpose of this article is to provide a historical overview of the use of alcohol in the African American community. To address the issue of alcoholism in the African American community, four dimensions of the issue will be addressed: the use of alcohol in Africa, views of Africans on drunken behavior, involvement of alcohol in the enslavement of Africans, and the establishment of drinking patterns in the United States among African Americans. Prior to beginning the discussion on the historical overview of alcohol in the African American community, it is necessary to make an assumption about the African American community that places the discussion on alcohol in a historical context. This assumption enhances the understanding of the dimensions of drinking in the African American community. The assumption for this discussion is that to understand the nuances of African American life it is imperative to begin in Africa. Knowledge of African culture leads to increased understanding of Black life in the United States. Nobles (1978) wrote that the Black culture has evolved from a special admixture of continued African worldview, operating within the cultural milieu of a European American culture. Thus he maintained that any theoretical and empirical framework for defining Black social reality must therefore be based on African cultural residuals as reflected in the worldview, normative assumptions, and frame of reference of Black people.

In An African American Discourse Community in Black & White: The New Orleans Tribune, an archival study of the first black-owned daily newspaper in the United States, I argue that the newspaper rhetorically constructed a literate African American discourse community worthy of citizenship and equal political rights within the public sphere of Reconstruction United States. Although contemporaneous media in the South depicted blacks as both unable to read and write and as culturally illiterate, I demonstrate how articles across the lifespan of the Tribune represented, as well as encouraged and enabled, multiple literacies within the African American community. I ultimately argue that the newspaper created an identity as citizen for free and emancipated blacks alike through its inclusion of evidence of blacks’ education and knowledge of historical texts; black men’s economic and agricultural literacies and black women’s domestic skills; and the community’s understanding of civics. Scholars within periodical studies, who have focused primarily on Victorian Britain, have argued that periodicals provide a unique space for historically oppressed populations to enter public discourse. This project links literacy studies, periodical studies, and African American studies by extending this reasoning to the literacy practices of African Americans and by investigating how the staff of the New Orleans Tribune sought entrance to public discourse but also circulated a counterdiscourse that challenged dominant stereotypes of blacks. Simultaneously, this project questions how the lack of scholarly work on the Tribune, “the most important Negro newspaper of the Civil War era,” continues to remind researchers that the erasure of African American resistance and agency is not unique to Reconstruction, but is replicated through tellings of history and accessibility of archives within the academy today. An African American Discourse Community in Black & White: The New Orleans Tribune uses the newspaper to retell the history of African American literacy in Reconstruction New Orleans as one of agency and oppositionality. Ultimately, I argue that the Tribune used self-representations of blacks’ literacy practices to rhetorically construct an African American discourse community that was worthy of citizenship and therefore suffrage.

Why and how to engage with African American faith communities in brain health research?

The Atlantic slave trade and its abolition created two distinct commercial spaces on the Gambia River that represent the use of similar tactics to project socioeconomic identities at different points in the Atlantic trade that are compared in this paper. First, the trading village of Juffure, at the heart of the Niumi polity’s commercial center, gained prominence during the height of the trade in the eighteenth century. It became home to a multiethnic community whose residents were entangled to varying degrees in commerce. Community members asserted status and identity through material means that were based in established traditions of crafting and feasting. A second and distinct commercial space emerged at the city of Bathurst, which the British established following abolition in 1807. This new commercial center took shape with its own unique multiethnic community. At Bathurst the “Liberated Africans” utilized Western middle-class practices including meals to assert their identity as African elite. Thus, both the Liberated Africans and residents of Juffure used foodways to project specific identities to gain entry into commerce.

Eliminating illiteracy has been one of the Nigerian government’s top priorities since its independence in 1960. The ministries of education and communication in Nigeria believe that “literacy” and “numeracy” are pivotal for economic, academic, and all-round societal development in the new media age. To ensure that literacy and numeracy transcend all borders of Nigeria, the federal and state governments often strategize on providing students with well-designed learning environments, technologies, teachers, and academic resources that facilitate functional education. This, perhaps, explains why the Edo State Basic Education Board (ESBED), the World Bank and Bridge International Academies (BIA) formed a public-private partnership (PPP) to develop the Edo Basic Education Sector Transformation (Edo-BEST) 1.0 and 2.0 programmes that focus on promoting primary and secondary schools’ education respectively in Edo State, Nigeria. The EdoBEST@Home unimodal mobile-based remote learning programme offers interactive audio lectures, digital self-study activity packages, digital stories, mobile interactive quizzes, learning aids for parents, and virtual classrooms allowing teacher-student interaction. Moored in Marshall McLuhan’s Technological Determinism Theory (TDT), this study probes the effectiveness and degree of attainment of the objectives of the EdoBEST 2.0 programme. Using a survey as a research design and a questionnaire as an instrument of data collection, three secondary schools (Ogbe Boys Grammar School, Idia College and Asoro Grammar School) in Benin City, the capital of Edo State were examined. The study combined this with key person interviews (KPIs) and triangulated the methodology with a historical-analytic technique. The findings of the study showed that the EdoBEST 2.0 programme has not been able to enhance secondary school education via the new media because the purported and widely publicized new media gadgets disbursed by the Edo State government to secondary school students and teachers, are to a large extent, merely hypothetical as the students and teachers have no access to the gadgets. With a population of over 4 million individuals, half of whom are under 30, Edo State lacks the connection and technological access necessary for remote learning. The study, therefore, recommended that the EdoBEST 2.0 programme be revamped and all factors hampering its set goals be addressed to ensure a positive impact on the secondary school educational ecosystem in Edo State. The federal and state governments must also review the academic syllabi to factor in the compulsory utilisation of new media technologies in teaching and learning and gradually phase out old-fashioned traditional teaching and learning methods such as the use of chalk and blackboard and the use of lesson notebooks without any digital backup.

The Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics of Migration in Contemporary Art from Angola and Its Diaspora

“On and off screen: Women's work in the screen industries”

The significance of the work of V. Y. Mudimbe can be cited from various points of view. First, it makes up part of the growing literature in recent years which critically reviews some of the epistemological claims underlying the history of the construction of the image of otherness in Western scholarship. Mudimbe's The Invention of Africa is a brilliant general survey of how Western construction of primitive and savage images of Africa, particularly in historical and anthropological studies, has influenced alienated discourse and self-identity among Africans themselves. Victim and product of this influence, African intellectual history unveils in itself a consistent rupture from its harshly negated past. In the humanities and social sciences in general, and in philosophy and religion in particular, African intellectuals continue to define their world on the basis of Western epistemological standards. Second, Mudimbe's work is also a brilliant intellectual description of the historical dilemmas which many educated African elites face daily in regard to how best to adapt what Jewsiewicki calls the usable to the construction of their present. Haunted by the feeling of their denigrated past, African elites, Mudimbe argues, are constantly eager to abandon it in order to adopt what is foreign (Western) because they think that it is modern and civilized. Everyday, the battle against the past is fought and the past, frequently called the traditional in the constructed discourse, is suppressed in legal suits, political rhetoric, economic and social planning and policy making. In this respect, Mudimbe implicitly raises significant questions about the contrast and complementarity between past and present as distinct periodizations of their history and identity. We can summarize those questions under the following three main points: - the definitions of tradition and its role in African representational discourse; - the contrast between traditionalism and Westernism-must they be contrasted, and what makes each of them acceptable or unacceptable; - the instruments for judging the acceptability or unacceptability of either traditionalism or Westernism, and who sets and standardizes those instruments. The Invention of Africa does not answer all these questions, but they present, I believe, the intellectual and social dilemmas and contexts with which Mudimbe's work basically deals, also brilliantly portrayed in his novels -the polygamous African husband married to two wives -one African the other white; or the contrast between the Church as a Western institution and Christianity as a set of deinstitutionalized values universally open to all, Africans included. The contemporary African intellectual in the humanities and social sciences is torn between two intellectual directions and has

The role of African languages in formal and nonformal learning is the subject of increasing local, national and international interests. Cognitive and pedagogical reasons abound for using the language best understood by the learner. However, many nonpedagogical factors related to politics, economics, language attitudes and colonial history are also extremely influential as decisions are made regarding language of instruction. Among the various stakeholders in this issue of language choice for education, an important interest group is the African elite. Members of the elite are able to access resources, marshal arguments that promote their values and ultimately influence the formulation and implementation of policy in ways that the average local community member cannot do. This paper examines the influence of international, national and local contexts upon the perspectives of the African elite where language and education are concerned. It argues that organized, intentional action by concerned members of the African elite can have significant impact on language-and-education choices.

Donas, nharas, and signares belonged to a class of women who obtained high social and economic standing in Africa’s west and west central region from the age of the European encounter to the era of mercantile companies and transatlantic slavery. These women owned slaves consistent with the notion of “slavery” or institutions of marginality within their specific West African and West Central African societies. As women who lived in close proximity to European military and mercantile installations on the Atlantic coast, they acted as cross-cultural brokers between European merchants and officials and African elites. Whether through marriages arranged by lineage elders or by relationships of convenience between African women and European men, donas, nharas, and signares entered contractual unions with European men. From the late 16th to the early 19th centuries, these relationships originated Afro-European families and established Afro-European men and some women as a propertied class along Africa’s Atlantic coast. Infamous in the texts of traveler’s accounts written by European men and a few Afro-European men, documentation of this era of women’s influence and their role in the Atlantic commercial system largely resides in European administrative reports and population data, court records and notarized documents, and published and unpublished genealogies.