Memories of Madagascar and Slavery in the Black Atlantic. Wendy Wilson-Fall

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СКАЧАТЬ African cultural dynamic based on African-originated practices in religion, the arts, and family structure.²⁵ In the 1970s, anthropologists Sidney Mintz and Richard Price introduced a more dynamic model. They stressed the amalgamation of various African influences and the invention of a new Atlantic Afro-American culture, which, by virtue of the conditions of its development in various slave societies, had some discernible African traits that could be identified, but in new forms of expression.²⁶

      Beyond the African creolization and African hybridized cultural core discussed by Mintz and Price, both respectively and together, lies a territory that is increasingly being explored and illuminated through research in African history and the transatlantic slave trade.²⁷ The recent burst of intellectual productivity of Africanist and Americanist historians has shown that for any given slave environment a continuum of more or less African continental cultural expression could be found, due to the constant arrival of new slaves, which continued in some places up to the mid-nineteenth century. Scholars have recently demonstrated that chronology, geography, and demographics have everything to do with what cultural syncretizations or borrowings did or did not take place in New World African diaspora communities.²⁸ The present volume draws on this perspective of ethnic and identity transformation over time as impacted by such factors as geography and settlement patterns.

      Specific information on points of embarkation and arrival has allowed new perspectives and greater understanding of the formation of the African diaspora communities of the Atlantic. We now know that trade and credit networks affected who went where and thus had much to do with the sorts of African cultural practice and cultural negotiation that took place in any given American site.²⁹ Recent scholarly work argues for close attention to the dynamic and synergetic nature of slave identities in the New World.³⁰ Increased research on New World slave cultures in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has revealed that not only regional differences and differences in plantation regime but also differences of management style and local social practices among planters had much to do with the evolving character of slave communities.³¹ For example, Robert “King” Carter in colonial Virginia had the tendency to purchase and settle “lots” of slaves led to cultural clusters of slaves from common or proximate cultural origins.³²

      Paying attention to local narrative and slave demographic patterns suggests posing questions concerning what African ethnic differences may have meant in plantation life, and the use of archival materials to evaluate social processes that characterized slave life from the point of view of their cultural lives, rather than the cultural universe of their masters.³³ At the same time, it is important to recognize that there was significant cultural borrowing between black slaves and their masters.³⁴ My book draws on both concerns, as the settlement of Malagasy slaves was dictated by the labor needs of the white families who owned them, and their cultural experience was dictated by their relationships with those whites and other Africans and creoles that whites owned. These issues were critical to understanding the processes of layering and hybridization that characterized the founding slave communities of the Americas.³⁵

      It is thus not a question of choosing between the creole (Mintz and Price) versus “pure” African (Herskovits) continuity arguments, but rather of assessing which framework best relates to specific contexts through time. My thesis is, then, that if any African, Malagasy, or other specific cultural practices, memories, or material-culture expressions remain in any observable form, they are to be found in the contrast of their specificity to the general creole nature of African American self-definition and practices through time.

      The Madagascar example, ironically, is from outside the African continent. Yet this difference in geography provides an important example of self-definition that may tell us more about the processes of rapid and deep change that characterized African American experiences in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The continued arrival of “saltwater” Negroes into already creolized communities and the paucity of archival evidence of specific African responses to the communities they encountered in New World societies make ethnohistoric analysis of this layering and integrative process difficult, if not impossible. It is noteworthy, however, that what is important to the oral narratives of slave descendants is often not what was important to early chroniclers of the American slave experience.

       Collection and Analysis of the Stories

      This study is more concerned with community experience and less focused on individuals, as my starting point is groups of people who arrived on ships, and the text continues with groups of people and their stories. The individual testimonies are about family groups and communities; they are narratives about the collective. In fact, seldom did any story confine itself to the life of the narrator. The social and cultural currency the narratives represent is to be brought out, admired, and shared among fellow believers and family members.

      I have used a wide lens to examine images of capture, slavery, and constraining conditions for free blacks in the early part of the nineteenth century as recounted by families today and as represented in the historical literature. Though some of the stories I collected are little more than anecdotes, their existence is important and merits serious inquiry. Life stories or individual oral histories would have been insufficient to the project of understanding the larger issues of the origins and persistence of practice of these family narratives. This monograph proceeds, therefore, from the viewpoint of a historical ethnography of a group experience. It is a study of how and why some people resisted simply being “negroes” or “blacks,” or even to be dominated by other African ethnic groups. I have sought to understand how some families instead fashioned a composite, layered identity of being “negroes” who were also, in some primordial way, children of people from Madagascar.

      As a social anthropologist, I have relied on ethnographic method in my interactions with various families and individuals and the Internet to maintain and sometimes sustain communication. As much as possible I have used historical context to weave many disparate threads together. What is to be learned from the emerging tapestry of texts can be gleaned neither solely from the substantive matter of the stories nor from the documented histories of slaves and slaveholders in Virginia. There is a lot to be learned from what was not said, both in the archives and the family stories, the emotional textures of what was remembered with pride or with shame, as well as the ideas that are repeated both within each narrative and among the narratives as a body. At times, I used my own African American identity to dig down to emotions and my own memories of hearing “the old folks talk” in order to extrapolate what the slave experience might have been and how the early immigrants might have felt. My mother’s great-grandfather is claimed as a Malagasy ancestor, so I have mined my own childhood experience of hearing that story for a notion of how to behave when listening to others’ stories.

      The material in the book is drawn from a collection of some thirty family narratives gathered over an extended period of time from face-to-face interviews, e-mails, focus group interviews, and telephone conversations. On a few occasions I learned that I had interviewed two or three people who were actually from the same core family group. The narrators are generally self-selected; they are all people who self-identify as descended from either an enslaved Malagasy person who arrived in the American South or a very early free immigrant from Madagascar. It seems that word of my research quickly spread among online communities, and at least a third of the stories I followed up on came to me via genealogy sites or direct e-mails from people who were interested in my work. The fact that I set up a website on the topic was surely important in helping me gain access to personal stories about “Madagascar ancestors.”³⁶

      I was also aided in my analysis of oral and written narratives by public responses to lectures I gave on my research over the years.³⁷ Some testimonies are from genealogical sites, where queries about Malagasy ancestors occur with surprising frequency—both on Afro-centered genealogical websites such as afrigeneas.com (run from Mississippi State University) and other more widely used search engines and genealogy study communities such as rootsweb. ancestry.com, ancestry.com, and cyndislist.com. СКАЧАТЬ