Gold Coast Diasporas: Identity, Culture, and Power PDF
Preview Gold Coast Diasporas: Identity, Culture, and Power
gold coast diasporas BLACKS IN THE DIASPORA Editors Herman L. Bennett Kim D. Butler Judith A. Byfield Tracy Sharpley-Whiting gold coast diasporas IDENTITY, CULTURE, AND POWER walter c. rucker Indiana University Press Bloomington & Indianapolis This book is a publication of Manufactured in the United States of America Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Cataloging-in-Publication Data is Herman B Wells Library 350 available from the Library of Congress. 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA ISBN 978-0-253-01694-2 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-253-01701-7 (ebook) iupress.indiana.edu 1 2 3 4 5 20 19 18 17 16 15 © 2015 by Walter C. Rucker All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences–Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992. For Bayo, Na’eem, and our new shining light, Ayinde. This page intentionally left blank CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 Part 1. Social Life and Death 1 Gold Coast Backgrounds 21 2 Making the Gold Coast Diaspora 66 3 Slavery, Ethnogenesis, and Social Resurrection 108 Part 2. Social Resurrection and Empowerment 4 State, Governance, and War 147 5 Obeah, Oaths, and Ancestral Spirits 179 6 Women, Regeneration, and Power 207 Postscript 229 Notes 235 Bibliography 271 Index 301 This page intentionally left blank ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Over the long, winding, and sometimes meandering transatlantic path I took in completing this project, a series of four watershed moments helped to anchor my thoughts and interpretations and facilitated my scholarly rebirth as an early-modern Black Atlantic specialist. The first moment occurred during a panel at the 1999 American Historical As- sociation meeting in Washington, D.C. Rosalyn Terborg-Penn’s help- ful challenge to me then, not to forget about women in my historical analyses, played a shaping role in the interpretive directions I have taken since the publication of my first book. A year later, at the inaugural As- sociation for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD) meeting in New York, Kim Butler’s public praise of my embryonic work on slave resistance and culture in antebellum South Carolina was the second moment. The third moment happened as I reversed the middle passage in a very personal way during my first visit to Ghana in the summer of 2002. Facilitated by a good colleague—Leon Caldwell—as well as funding from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln (UNL) and a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend, my trip to and through Ghana provided a Black Atlantic frame for my evolv- ing understandings of Atlantic history, cultural change, memory, and trauma. The fourth and final moment—pivotal in my reincarnation as an early-modern Black Atlantic historian—was the 2009 ASWAD confer- ence in Accra, Ghana, where I presented my first paper on this project. This book owes debts, of a variety of sorts, to several people. First and foremost, a small group of colleagues and friends whom I hold in the highest esteem—all are also the smartest people I know—provided support, much-needed and timely criticism, and platforms upon which
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