This seminar examines Africa and Africans as active participants of the history of the modern Atlantic world, encompassing Africa, the Americas, and Europe. Africans shaped modern history not only as slaves, but as traders, revolutionaries, missionaries, and intellectuals. After looking at scholarly definitions of the Atlantic world, we will examine several case studies including revolutionary Haiti; late-18th-century London; 19th-century South Africa and the U.S. South; 19th- and 20th-century Brazil and West Africa; and interwar Paris. Many of our examples involve movement around an Atlantic world and different source materials, sometimes in the words of Africans and people of African descent themselves. How are African women and men and their descendants represented in histories that incorporate multiple locations and nations? How do they identify themselves, and how do their identities shift over time? |