Memories of the Slave Trade: Ritual and the Historical Imagination in Sierra Leone

Shaw, Rosalind

ISBN 10: 0226751325 / ISBN 13: 9780226751320

Editore: University of Chicago Press, 2002

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[Interesting provenance: From the private library of renowned historian, Philip D. Morgan.] Softcover. Good binding and cover. Edge wear. Spine sunned. Contemporary signature of Morgan on front end page, else unmarked. Drawing on fieldwork and archival research, Shaw argues that memories of the slave trade in Sierra Leone have shaped (and been reshaped by) experiences of colonialism, postcolonialsm, and the country's ten-year rebel war." From the professional library of Dr. Philip D. Morgan, a professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. Morgan specializes in the African-American experience, the history of slavery, the early Caribbean, and the study of the early Atlantic world. Morgan is the author of more than 14 books on Colonial America and African American history. He has won both the Bancroft Prize and the Frederick Douglass Prize for his book Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (1998).

Codice articolo 2505050045

Dati bibliografici

• Titolo: Memories of the Slave Trade: Ritual and the Historical Imagination in Sierra Leone
• Editore: University of Chicago Press
• Data di pubblicazione: 2002
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0226751325
• ISBN 13: 9780226751320
• Rilegatura: Paperback
• Condizione: Very Good
• Peso: 16 once
• Cataloghi dei venditori:
  • African History

Descrizione articolo

Riassunto

How is the slave trade remembered in West Africa? In a work that challenges recurring claims that Africans felt (and still feel) no sense of moral responsibility concerning the sale of slaves, Rosalind Shaw traces memories of the slave trade in Temne-speaking communities in Sierra Leone. While the slave-trading past is rarely remembered in explicit verbal accounts, it is often made vividly present in such forms as rogue spirits, ritual specialists' visions, and the imagery of divination techniques.

Drawing on extensive fieldwork and archival research, Shaw argues that memories of the slave trade have shaped (and been reshaped by) experiences of colonialism, postcolonialism, and the country's ten-year rebel war. Thus money and commodities, for instance, are often linked to an invisible city of witches whose affluence was built on the theft of human lives. These ritual and visionary memories make hitherto invisible realities manifest, forming a prism through which past and present mutually configure each other.

Informazioni sull?autore

Rosalind Shaw is an associate professor of sociocultural anthropology at Tufts University. She is coeditor of Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism: The Politics of Religious Synthesis and Dreaming, Religion and Society in Africa.