Slave Culture : Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America

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Oxford University Press, USA, 23 àÁ.Â. 1987 - 444 ˹éÒ
How were blacks in American slavery formed, out of a multiplicity of African ethnic peoples, into a single people? In this major study of Afro-American culture, Sterling Stuckey, a leading thinker on black nationalism for the past twenty years, explains how different African peoples interacted during the nineteenth century to achieve a common culture. He finds that, at the time of emancipation, slaves were still overwhelmingly African in culture, a conclusion with profound implications for theories of black liberation and for the future of race relations in America. By examining anthropological evidence about Central and West African cultural traditions--Bakongo, Ibo, Dahomean, Mendi and others--and exploring the folklore of the American slave, Stuckey has arrived at an important new cross-cultural analysis of the Pan-African impulse among slaves that contributed to the formation of a black ethos. He establishes, for example, the centrality of an ancient African ritual--the Ring Shout or Circle Dance--to the black American religious and artistic experience. Black nationalist theories, the author points out, are those most in tune with the implication of an African presence in America during and since slavery. Casting a fresh new light on these ideas, Stuckey provides us with fascinating profiles of such nineteenth century figures as David Walker, Henry Highland Garnet, and Frederick Douglas. He then considers in detail the lives and careers of W. E. B. Dubois and Paul Robeson in this century, describing their ambition that blacks in American society, while struggling to end racism, take on roles that truly reflected their African heritage. These concepts of black liberation, Stuckey suggests, are far more relevant to the intrinsic values of black people than integrationist thought on race relations. But in a final revelation he concludes that, with the exception of Paul Robeson, the ironic tendency of black nationalists has been to underestimate the depths of African culture in black Americans and the sophistication of the slave community they arose from.

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Paul Robeson and the Ends of Nationalist Theory and Practice
303
Notes
359

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Ples Sterling Stuckey Jr. was born in Memphis, Tennessee on March 2, 1932. He worked part-time as a high school teacher and postal clerk while earning his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees from Northwestern University. He joined the faculty of Northwestern University in 1971 and became a full professor in 1977. He then taught history at the University of California, Riverside, from 1989 until his retirement in 2004. As a historian, he documented how uprooted Africans not only retained their culture while they survived slavery but eventually saturated the rest of American society with their transplanted traditions. He wrote several books including Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America, Going Through the Storm: The Influence of African American Art in History, and The Chambers of the Soul: Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville and the Blues. He died after suffering a stroke on August 15, 2018 at the age of 86.

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