Jubilee: The Emergence of African-American Culture [Hardcover]

Howard Dodson (Author), Amiri Baraka (Author), Gail Lumet Buckley (Author), Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Author), Annette Gordon-Reed (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1, 2003

The word jubilee means, among other things, "a celebration in anticipation of future happiness." Based on new scholarship by the Schomburg Center, Jubilee presents a fresh, new perspective on how enslaved Africans triumphed over slavery. Working as creative agents of their own destiny within the shackles of slavery, enslaved Africans reinvented themselves as a new people - a new American people - laying the foundations for truly unique African-American social, cultural, political, and economic expressions throughout the Western Hemisphere. With almost two hundred illustrations, including early slave ship manifests, manumission papers, early photographs of slaves and of freed African-Americans, paintings, and artifacts from shackles to freedom quilts.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This is that rare title that effortlessly spans audience and age-group divides while it popularizes serious and compelling scholarship, in this case challenging widely held conceptions about modern culture in the Americas. In clean, almost terse prose Dodson presents a welter of facts showing the extent to which the colonization of North and South American depended on slave labor. A page-long foreword from Wynton Marsalis recalls the New Orleans culture of his youth. Next, Dodson (who has been director of Harlem's Schomberg Center for Research and Black Culture at the New York Public Library since 1984), along with his stellar team of scholars and poets, zeroes in on the Americas of the 17th and 18th centuries, when there were far more Black Americans than white. More than 200 photos and illustrations from the Schomberg's collection of more than five million work terrifically, selected specifically to counteract endlessly repeated images of victimization and document Black economies. They keep the story moving quickly and forcefully, and show concretely how black resistance resulted in cultural adaptations that now form the basis of cultures in the Americas: African and African-American carvings; portraits of prominent business and cultural figures; close-ups of irons and other implements of torture; marriage and other documents; contemporary press and poetry-there is an impressive amount of documentation here, culminating in the end of the Civil War. Never before have the economic and cultural histories of slavery come together so concisely and accessibly. This is an explosive, necessary book.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: National Geographic (February 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0792269829
• ISBN-13: 978-0792269823
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 0.9 x 11.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #544,061 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A CELEBRATION OF AFRICAN AMERICAN CULTURE, February 9, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Jubilee: The Emergence of African-American Culture (Hardcover)

The title surprised me. Never would I think of "Jubilee" when it comes to slavery. But the end of the slavery era was, indeed, a celebration. And now National Geographic has presented us with an astonishing and beautiful commemoration of the blood, sweat, tears, and toil of enslaved Africans. For a group of people who gave, literally, their labor to build the foundation of the world's greatest culture, we do indeed owe our collective thanks. National Geographic has done just that with this extraordinary book, done in collaboration with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The essays help enormously, as they give voice to the descendants of that painful era. If ever there was a must-read, Jubilee is it!