Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South [Paperback]

Michael A. Gomez (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 18, 1998 | ISBN-10: 0807846945 | ISBN-13: 978-0807846940

The transatlantic slave trade brought individuals from diverse African regions and cultures to a common destiny in the American South. In this comprehensive study, Michael Gomez establishes tangible links between the African American community and its African origins and traces the process by which African populations exchanged their distinct ethnic identities for one defined primarily by the conception of race. He examines transformations in the politics, social structures, and religions of slave populations through 1830, by which time the contours of a new African American identity had begun to emerge.

After discussing specific ethnic groups in Africa, Gomez follows their movement to North America, where they tended to be amassed in recognizable concentrations within individual colonies (and, later, states). For this reason, he argues, it is possible to identify particular ethnic cultural influences and ensuing social formations that heretofore have been considered unrecoverable. Using sources pertaining to the African continent as well as runaway slave advertisements, ex-slave narratives, and folklore, Gomez reveals concrete and specific links between particular African populations and their North American progeny, thereby shedding new light on subsequent African American social formation.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

With its legacy of brutality and of the horrific overseas passage, the transatlantic slave trade may be imagined as the kidnapping of Africans without regard to nationality or ethnicity. Based on his research, however, Michael A. Gomez suggests that Africans, upon arriving in America, were dispersed much more closely along ethnic and cultural lines than previously acknowledged. The underlying theme of his provocative work, Exchanging Our Country Marks, is that while blacks eventually replaced their African ethnic identities with new racial ones after arriving in the American South, they retained much of their original cultures far longer than was originally suspected. Some of his most interesting evidence of this comes in the form of runaway-slave advertisements, which identified the slaves by their ethnic roots ("Dinah, an Ebo wench that speaks very good English"). By scrutinizing ex-slave narratives, stories, music, and even the location and nature of slave rebellions, Gomez pieces together a genealogy of blacks in the American South, attempting to examine their notions of identity. Of course, much is based on significant speculation, a fact that only underscores the difficulty of such scholarship. Gomez manages to present a wide range of information clearly as he expands on a wealth of recent research regarding the slave trade and the history of blacks in America, making Exchanging Our Country Marks a vast and creative exploration of African identity in the United States from 1526 to 1830.

Review

[A] conceptual tour de force. No brief review can do justice to the nuances and complexities of Gomez's argument.

Southern Cultures

[A] rare and creative inquiry into the origins of African identity in the United States from 1526 to 1830.

Gaither Reporter

Gomez gracefully and distinctively enlivens slaves• understandings of themselves as Igbo, Muslims, parents, children, and—eventually—•Africans• and Americans.

Journal of Southern History

Deeply researched in both African and North American sources.

nternational Journal of African Historical Studies

Gomez has yoked his admirable grasp of recent advances in African historiography with a subtle and sensitive reading of slavery.

American Historical Review

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press (March 18, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807846945
• ISBN-13: 978-0807846940
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #84,913 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An innovative and essential book in African Diaspora studies, June 26, 1998

By 

Ras Michael Brown ([e-mail]) (New Orleans, LA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Paperback)

Prof. Gomez has used a wealth of sources, many of which have been underutilized or neglected, to write a rich and nuanced meditation on the evolution of identity among Africans and their progeny in North America. His use of folklore points the way for new research in a field that oddly fails much too often to consider the voices of people of African descent. Every student at every level with interests in African-American studies or African Diaspora Studies must know this work.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Opening a new door to our history and our struggle, December 7, 2006

By 

Tony Thomas (SUNNY ISLES BEACH, FL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Paperback)

This book is of decisive importance, for by studying the convergence of an African American nationality out of the various nationalities and ethnicities that people were brought here from Africa, Michael Gomez underlines the function of the African-origins cultures and the construction of an African-American culture in a process of resistance and opposition to the inslavement, dehumanization, and degredation that Africans and their descendants have face.

Contrary to many popular assumptions, Gomez shows that in colonial and early independent America slave holders and slaves were quite aware of the different African cultures and ethnicities represented among the enslaved. Trade patterns, affinities of slave buyers for certain types of ethnicities, beliefs that some peoples were good for some tasks, others for others, led to many concentrations of slaves from the same culture and language groups in colonial America. This ensured that Africans in American tended to preserve very much of their native cultures, religions, and outlooks.

Indeed, Gomez illustrates that in language and religion large sections of the African American people in becoming retained their African religion, and at first retained their African languages, and then began our own African American language (Black English) precisely because the context of the dominant culture and its language and religion were hostile to the human dignity of Africans in America and their descendants.

Gomez's solid research and clear evaluation of massive amounts of original sources upsets many ideas on African American history that were assumptions and not facts. One of the most important is the lateness and difficulty that Christianity had in gaining seizable conversions among Africans in America and their descendants. He suggests that only by the time of the Civil War were African Americans substantially Christian. Gomez demonstrates that except for an overly assimilationist minority among "freed" slaves, Christianity only caught on where African religeous practices were mixed into it. More importantly, Gomez explains the reason for the final victory of Christianity is that it could be manipulated to provide a rationale and hope of liberation from racism and oppression both metaphysical and physical, that the individual African religions could not provide. Gomez illustrates that what occured was the development of an African American religion, rather than the adoption of a European religion.

In the process, the reader will learn new and more accurate views of whence and when Africans were brought to America during the period of slavery. The reader will learn the general political and religious outlooks of the different major groups of Africans who came here. The reader will learn a survey of the historical, economic, and political upheavals in AFrica wrought by the slave trade.

This is a serious and important book, written at the highest level of scholarship. Thus, it is sometimes not easy reading and certainly is not written as a popular entertainment. Yet, even the casual reader who sticks with this book and turns to Gomez's notes and bibliographic material for more to read will be vastly rewarded.

11 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This work is a must read!, March 15, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Hardcover)

Gomez has done a tremendous service to the study of Africana by giving tangible evidence to what have heretofore been the answers rather than the questions on the who, what, where, when and WHY's of the African slave in America. Readers will be surprised at the degree to which something other than fact has helped form the base of their "knowledge". Suddenly the image of tobacco or rice will gain greater resonance than cotton. Virginia and Senegambia, for example, will have new and sharper meanings as we better ferret out who we were as Ghanaians, Senegambians, Angolans, etc. and how we became who we are as African-Americans.