African Diaspora at Internet Archive: Slave Culture

The theme this week is secondary literature, and the author I want to feature is the great historian Sterling Stuckey, starting with this monumental book, published in 1987: Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America.

You can get a sense of the book's argument from its opening paragraph:

The final gift of African "tribalism" in the nineteenth century was its life as a lingering memory in the minds of American slaves. That memory enabled them to go back to the sense of community in the traditional African setting and to include all Africans in their common experience of oppression in North America. It is greatly ironic, therefore, that African ethnicity, an obstacle to African nationalism in the twentieth century, was in this way the principal avenue to black unity in antebellum America. Whether free black or slave, whether in the North or in the South, the ultimate impact of that development was profound.

Stuckey explores these same themes in this later collection of essays: Going Through the Storm: The Influence of African American Art in History, published in 1994. 

Notably, this book opens with a foundational essay that Stuckey first published in 1968: "Through the Prism of Folklore: The Black Ethos in Slavery." Here is how Julius Lester characterized the essay in a New York Times review: 

Stuckey places the spiritual in its slavery con text, showing how it was a major weapon of resistance to that dehu manizing institution (which others have found only “peculiar”) and the principal means through which the slaves fashioned and maintained an identity separate from that which the slaveholders fought to impose upon them.

Another essay of great importance for looking at African diaspora stories in African American storytelling: "Black Americans and African Consciousness: Du Bois, Woodson, and the Spell of Africa."

You can find out more about Stuckey's life and career in this Wikipedia article about him, and his obituary appeared in the New York Times; he died just a few years ago, in 2018.

I was so glad to find both of these books available at the Internet Archive!

Going Through the Storm: The Influence

of African American Art in History

by Sterling Stuckey

Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory

and the Foundations of Black America

by Sterling Stuckey