SLAVERY AND THE AFRICAN IMAGINATION

Abstract

One of the most interesting developments in recent years in the field of African American studies has been the expansion of its horizons beyond the North American theater of Black life and expression that has for so long been featured as its principal focus, and often, in many academic departments, as the only one. Yet, as the early scholarship which serves as the foundation for the field demonstrated, the Black experience in the New World has always presented a continental dimension that provides the concrete grounding for the historical perspective from which that experience must be viewed and understood. This was the methodological premise underlying the work of scholars such as Melville Herskovits (1941) and Roger Bastide (1967), who ranged throughout the Black world in quest of the lived connections that gave an original African imprint to the Black experience, while providing theoretical validity to the very concept of a Black world. In the works of such scholars, the consciousness of a continuum that connects Africa to the Black experience in the New World underlies the effort to comprehend the Black diaspora itself in its manifold wholeness.