About the Book
“This book connects the history of music to the history of slavery in the Americas”–
Book Synopsis
Music, that fundamental form of human expression, is one of the most powerful cultural continuities fostered by enslaved Africans and their descendants throughout the Americas. The roots of so much of the music beloved around the world today are drawn directly from the men and women carried across the Atlantic in chains, from the west coast of Africa to the shores of the so-called New World. This important new book bridges African diaspora studies, music studies, and transatlantic and colonial American literature to trace the lineage of African and African diasporic musical life in the early modern period.
Mary Caton Lingold meticulously analyzes surviving sources, especially European travelogues, to recover the lives of African performers, the sounds they created, and the meaning their musical creations held in Africa and later for enslaved communities in the Caribbean and throughout the plantation Americas. The book provides a rich history of early African sound and a revelatory analysis of the many ways that music shaped enslavement and colonization in the Americas.
Review Quotes
Mary Caton Lingold has given us a deeply researched and fascinating narrative about the very beginnings of the musicking of Africans in the Atlantic world. Focusing mainly on the anglophone Caribbean, and the American South, but also West and West Central Africa, the book opens with vivid records of performance in Atlantic Africa before shifting to track the evolution of musical life on US plantations in the 17th and 18th centuries. The greatest strength of this book lies in Lingold’s depiction of the sonic experiences of enslaved Africans as they entertained within their own communities. This is real folks’ history, richly told from the perspective of what Fred Moten calls the undercommons. With a keen ear toward the hidden transcripts embedded within the strata of history, Lingold draws extensively on European travel accounts, as well as the letters of settlers, traders, colonial officials and missionaries. This is a landmark effort which is sure to spark further interest in a fascinating period in the evolution of the musical culture of the Black Atlantic. Highly recommended.
–Corey Harris, award-winning musician
A rich, well-written and well-researched book on a novel and important topic. African Musicians in the Atlantic World will make a major contribution to multiple fields, including music history, Atlantic studies, colonial Caribbean history and literature, as well as studies of transatlantic slavery, the African diaspora, and Black culture in the Americas. It is full of fascinating archival discoveries and insights.
–Lisa Voigt, Yale University, author of Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic: Circulations of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds
About the Author
Mary Caton Lingold is Associate Professor of English and Director of the PhD Program in Media, Art, and Text at Virginia Commonwealth University
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