Gullah Research Articles

African Sounds in Gullah Geechee and on Middle Caicos

African Sounds in Gullah Geechee and on Middle Caicos

African American Life in the Georgia Lowcountry: The Atlantic World and the Gullah Geechee

African American Life in the Georgia Lowcountry: The Atlantic World and the Gullah Geechee

Gullah Geechee Culture: Respected, Understood and Striving: Sixty Years after Lorenzo Dow Turner's Masterpiece,Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect

Gullah Geechee Culture: Respected, Understood and Striving: Sixty Years after Lorenzo Dow Turner's Masterpiece,<i>Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect</i>

Gullah Geechee Culture: Respected, Understood and Striving: Sixty Years after Lorenzo Dow Turner's Masterpiece, Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect

(2011). Gullah Geechee Culture: Respected, Understood and Striving: Sixty Years after Lorenzo Dow Turner's Masterpiece, Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect. The Black Scholar: Vol. 41, The Living Legacy of Lorenzo Dow Turner The First African-American Linguist, pp. 77-84.

African American life in the Georgia lowcountry: the Atlantic world and the Gullah Geechee

The lush landscape and subtropical climate of the Georgia coast only enhance the air of mystery enveloping some of its inhabitants--people who owe, in some ways, as much to Africa as to America. As the ten previously unpublished essays in this volume examine various aspects of Georgia lowcountry life, they often engage a central dilemma: the region's physical and cultural remoteness helps to preserve the venerable ways of its black inhabitants, but it can also marginalize the vital place of lowcountry blacks in the Atlantic World.The essays, which range in coverage from the founding of the Georgia colony in the early 1700s through the present era, explore a range of topics, all within the larger context of the Atlantic world. Included are essays on the double-edged freedom that the American Revolution made possible to black women, the lowcountry as site of the largest gathering of African Muslims in early North America, and the coexisting worlds of Christianity and conjuring in coastal Georgia and the links (with variations) to African practices.A number of fascinating, memorable characters emerge, among them the defiant Mustapha Shaw, who felt entitled to land on Ossabaw Island and resisted its seizure by whites only to become embroiled in struggles with other blacks; Betty, the slave woman who, in the spirit of the American Revolution, presented a list of grievances to her master; and S'Quash, the Arabic-speaking Muslim who arrived on one of the last legal transatlantic slavers and became a head man on a North Carolina plantation.Published in association with the Georgia Humanities Council.

Philip Morgan , editor. African American Life in the Georgia Lowcountry: The Atlantic World and the Gullah Geechee . (Race in the Atlantic World, 1700–1900.) Athens : University of Georgia Press , in association with the Georgia Humanities Council. 2010 . Pp. xi, 311. $34.95.

Philip Morgan , editor. African American Life in the Georgia Lowcountry: The Atlantic World and the Gullah Geechee . (Race in the Atlantic World, 1700–1900.) Athens : University of Georgia Press , in association with the Georgia Humanities Council. 2010 . Pp. xi, 311. $34.95.

Encountering the Familiarity of a Foreign Culture: Julie Dash's Novel Daughters of the Dust

This essay analyzes Julie Dash’s 1997 novel Daughters of the Dust with regard to its portrayal of the Gullah culture, its strategies of familiarizing an outsider readership with a foreign culture, and the way it depicts representations of culture in anthropology and literature. The analysis works on two levels: it examines how intercultural encounters are portrayed in the novel as well as how the novel itself functions as “entry point” to the Gullah culture. It argues that Dash presents cultures as distinct though not disclosed entities where boundaries can be transgressed though not transcended.

Review of Wade-Lewis (2007): Lorenzo Dow Turner: Father of Gullah studies

Review of Wade-Lewis (2007): Lorenzo Dow Turner: Father of Gullah studies

Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links (review)

Reviewed by: Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links Daniel C. Littlefield (bio) Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links By Gwendolyn Midlo Hall; University of North Carolina Press; 248 pp. Cloth, $34.95 When Alex Haley's Roots appeared in 1976 it set off a storm of excitement among African Americans about the possibilities of tracing their ancestry to a particular African homeland. The success of the television series based on the book, which attracted more viewers than any series up to that time, fanned the flames and spread an interest in African heritage beyond the African American community, inciting curiosity if not genuine concern. Of course, for every popular action there is an equally popular counter-action. While many enthusiastically embraced the notion that a personal search was plausible and useful, others were just as firm that the idea was misplaced and a waste of time. Africans were so mixed among themselves, so blended with Europeans, so lacking in reliable documentation, and so bereft of much worth remembering anyway, that it were better to focus on the future and to give little more than a perfunctory nod to the past. The television program, if not the book, did at least get people to consider that past—an Africa that contained sentient and feeling human beings and a grasping system of labor that sought to repress and dehumanize that population—but for most people the generalities were sufficient, and controversies that developed around the research of the book vitiated the case for those who desired to find their own ancestral village. Yet Roots marked a public recognition among black and white Americans that there was an African past, however one marked or defined it, and scholars, a few of whom had a long-standing interest, redoubled their efforts and tripled or quadrupled in number. Despite the significant number of academic books that have [End Page 116] appeared since that time, controversy still abounds over the level of specificity that can be approached in connecting Africa and America. Gwendolyn Hall's book "challenges the still widely held belief among scholars as well as the general public that Africans so fragmented when they arrived in the Western Hemisphere that specific African regions and ethnicities had little influence on particular regions in the Americas." This assumption continues to exist despite the proliferation of studies that, in one way or another, argue the contrary. These range from books that seek a scientific link through use of blood types and gene pools (as, for example, William S. Pollitzer, The Gullah People and Their African Heritage, 1999), to those that posit occasionally romantic, even mystical, connections through various manifestations of culture and outlook (as some of the essays in Joseph E. Holloway, ed., Africanisms in American Culture, 1991). Simultaneously, there have been a number of historical, anthropological, and archeological monographs that seek to document this background by careful archival research and fieldwork. The task has been immensely eased by the appearance of two important databases available on CD-ROM : David Eltis, et al., The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade (1999) and Hall's own Louisiana Slave Database, 1719–1820 (2000). These search engines make it possible, in one case, to follow slave ships from an African region to an American one, and, in the other, to go from an American region to an African one using the self-identification of slaves. Hall argues that the French were more solicitous about recording the ethnic origin of their bound African labor over a longer period of time than other European groups, and much of what they recorded came from the Africans themselves. The English were least concerned and, in contrast to the prevailing situation in, say, Virginia or South Carolina, the longer an African remained in early Louisiana, the more likely his ethnicity was to be identified. The subject is of unusual interest because it lies at the intersection of a public and an academic concern and because it has a political component. African Americans began a widespread embrace of their African heritage and of their "black" complexion in the 1960s as an offshoot of the Civil Rights Movement, and while the...

Gullah culture in America

In 1989, 1998, and 2005, fifteen Gullah speakers went to Sierra Leone and other parts of West Africa to trace their origins and ancestry. Their journey frames this exploration of the extraordinary history of the Gullah culture-characterized by strong African cultural retention and a direct influence on American culture, particularly in the South-described in this fascinating book. Since long before the Revolution, America has had hidden pockets of a bygone African culture with a language of its own, and long endowed with traditions, language, design, medicine, agriculture, fishing, hunting, weaving, and the arts. This book explores the Gullah culture's direct link to Africa, via the sea islands of the American southeast. The first published evidence of Gullah went almost unrecorded until the 1860s, when missionaries from Philadelphia made their way, even as the Civil War was at its height, to St. Helena Island, South Carolina, to establish a small institution called Penn School to help freed slaves learn how to read and write and make a living in a world of upheaval and distress. There they noticed that most of the islanders spoke a language that was only part English, tempered with expressions and idioms, often spoken in a melodious, euphonic manner, accompanied by distinctive practices in religion, work, dancing, greetings, and the arts. The homogeneity, richness, and consistency of this culture was possible because the sea-islanders were isolated. Even today, there are more than 300,000 Gullah people, many of whom speak little or no English, living in the remoter areas of the sea islands of St. Helena, Edisto, Coosay, Ossabaw, Sapelo, Daufuskie, and Cumberland. Gullah Culture in America explores not only the history of Gullah, but takes the reader behind the scenes of Gullah culture today to show what it's like to grow up, live, and celebrate in this remarkable and uniquely American community.

Review: Cooking the Gullah Way, Morning, Noon, and Night, by Sallie Ann Robinson, Gloria J. Underwood, and Jessica B. Harris

Review: <i>Cooking the Gullah Way, Morning, Noon, and Night</i>, by Sallie Ann Robinson, Gloria J. Underwood, and Jessica B. Harris

The Gullah People and Their African Heritage:The Gullah People and Their African Heritage.

The Gullah People and Their African Heritage. William S. Pollitzer. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999.298 pp.

Mission Matters: Mount Holyoke, Oberlin, and the Schooling of Southern Blacks, 1861–1917

At the end of her spring term in 1862, Martha Hale Clary bade farewell to her classmates at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary one year before she was to graduate. She was a 24 year-old teacher, the daughter of a farming family from Conway, Massachusetts, who had graduated from Westfield State Normal School five years earlier. By the autumn of 1862, she was living in an abandoned plantation house in Beaufort, South Carolina, organizing a school for the Gullah people not many miles from Confederate lines, one of the earliest participants in the Sea Islands’ “Rehearsal for Reconstruction.” For the next eleven years she taught scores of the islands’ freed slaves in Beaufort and Hilton Head, one of the hundreds of teachers sponsored by the venerable American Missionary Association (AMA). By the early 1870s, young former slaves had themselves gained sufficient education to become their people's elementary teachers, so in 1873 Martha Clary accepted a position with the Presbyterian Committee on Missions to the Freedmen to teach in its academy for black students in North Carolina, Scotia Seminary. She would remain there for another fourteen years, finally retiring to her native state in 1887 after twenty-five years of service to southern African Americans.

The Gullah People and Their African Heritage

The Gullah People and Their African Heritage

Gullah and the Task System

Gullah and the Task System

The Gullah people and their African heritage

American Journal of Human BiologyVolume 13, Issue 2 p. 284-285 Book Review The Gullah people and their African heritage Curtis W. Wienker, Curtis W. Wienker Department of Anthropology, University of South Florida, Tampa, FloridaSearch for more papers by this author Curtis W. Wienker, Curtis W. Wienker Department of Anthropology, University of South Florida, Tampa, FloridaSearch for more papers by this author First published: 01 February 2001 https://doi.org/10.1002/1520-6300(200102/03)13:2<284::AID-AJHB1043>3.0.CO;2-MAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume13, Issue2February/March 2001Pages 284-285 RelatedInformation

The Gullah people and their African heritage

The Gullah people and their African heritage

The Gullah people and their African heritage

Isolated off the South Carolina-Georgia coast for three centuries, the Gullah people have developed a culture that remains in many ways as African as it is American. This work examines this society, emphasizing its roots in Africa, its unique imprint on America, and current threats to its survival.

The Ecology of Gullah's Survival

L'A. analyse les facteurs ecologiques qui ont contribue au maintien du gullah, creole anglais parle par les descendants africains-americains vivant aux Etats-Unis, sur la cote sud de la Caroline, ainsi qu'en Georgie. L'identite linguistique, l'appartenance au groupe, l'isolement social et geographique, sont autant de facteurs ecologiques qui ont permis a cette communaute linguistique, pourtant assez reduite numeriquement, de conserver sa langue

The Fable of the Southern Writer (review)

518Southern Cultures attitudes toward Gullah people and serpent handlers. While he admired Gullah culture as "rhythmic, graceful, sinuous," he viewed serpent handling as desperate religion, a response to severe poverty, a faith that allows participants "a brief deluded escape, for which they're willing to risk their lives." Reconsidering his value judgments, Dunlap concluded that "southern whites have always been the odd man out," their culture devalued and misunderstood. These final two articles, Birckhead's convincing indictment and Dunlap's sincere apology, suggest questions. How should outsiders respond to the cultures of the South? Should anthropologists celebrate, condemn, photograph, or report? Is objective anthropological research possible when one is examining popular culture? Are poststructuralist approaches accurate or applicable? There are no easy resolutions to the complex research questions posed by the mythic South. But this volume indicates the exciting possibilities that exist when academics cross disciplinary boundaries to examine the construction of myths. This strategy, which scholars in American studies have been pursuing since the 1950s, has finally enlightened the field of anthropology. The Fable of the Southern Writer. By Lewis P. Simpson. Louisiana State University Press, 1994. 249 pp. Cloth, $24.95. Reviewed by Michael Kreyling, professor ofEnglish at Vanderbilt University, where he teaches southern literature and American literature. Once upon a time there was "The South," and it was both historical and ideological. "Of the Mississippi the bank sinister ; of the Ohio the bank sinister" one of the poetwizards of the South wrote, thus placing it simultaneously on the maps of history and of Mind. Into this magic realm came a young "clerk," Lewis P. Simpson , and it was his vocation to explore the South-as-Mind. He suspected that the South was actually an outpost of a larger Kingdom of Mind, America, which in turn was also an outpost of a larger entity, Reprinted with the permission of Louisiana State University Press. Reviews519 the West. This was a riddling view, but Simpson was and is an aficionado of riddles and puzzles with interlocking parts. He was at home in Mind, knew its language and manners. For more than four decades he explored and mapped Mind and the South, rather than Mind of the South, which was another explorer's motto. Nuance was one of Simpson's most telling instruments, and he also had the special talismanic idea of a senior wizard named Eric Voegelin to help him with the larger picture. Simpson then picked up morsels of nuance in the territory of Mind-and-South, and he dropped some on his trail for us to follow. We have learned from Lewis Simpson, as from no other, to see the South as Mind, an act of thought. The Fable of the Southern Writer, eleven interlocking essays gathered from the trail of the last fifteen years, seems to be Simpson's most revealing book of more than a dozen published under his name. Do not be lulled by his deceptive prefatory statement that "historians and critics simply talk about poets and novelists": there is nothing "simple" about the way these essays are crafted and arranged. Simpson not only reprises some of his more stunning findings (and his method of exploration), but FaWe marks a deft redirection of his work and confronts, as if yet in the middle distance and muffled, another country where the maps of the past might not work as reliable guides. The essays collected in The Fable of the Southern Writer are knitted together by the yarn of autobiography. Indeed, the final essay is Simpson's own deceptively unassuming "yarn," an autobiography of growing up in East Texas, with flashbacks to the frontier of his ancestors and ending with his departure for the University of Texas. The thread of autobiography leads to another departure for Simpson. In his earlier work Allen Tate had been, among the original guides to South, his intellectual focus. The second essay in Fable, however , contains a kind of hail and farewell: "I shall leave further discussion of Jefferson to later, and turn, as I do elsewhere in the present studies, to Allen Tate, who as one explores the cultural history of the South, emerges more and more as a central figure...