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African American Life in the Georgia Lowcountry: The Atlantic World and the Gullah Geechee

African American Life in the Georgia Lowcountry: The Atlantic World and the Gullah Geechee

African American Life in the Georgia Lowcountry: The Atlantic World and the Gullah Geechee

African American Life in the Georgia Lowcountry: The Atlantic World and the Gullah Geechee

Overview

The lush landscape and subtropical climate of the Georgia coast only enhance the air of mystery enveloping some of its inhabitants—people who owe, in some ways, as much to Africa as to America. As the ten previously unpublished essays in this volume examine various aspects of Georgia lowcountry life, they often engage a central dilemma: the region’s physical and cultural remoteness helps to preserve the venerable ways of its black inhabitants, but it can also marginalize the vital place of lowcountry blacks in the Atlantic World.

The essays, which range in coverage from the founding of the Georgia colony in the early 1700s through the present era, explore a range of topics, all within the larger context of the Atlantic world. Included are essays on the double-edged freedom that the American Revolution made possible to black women, the lowcountry as site of the largest gathering of African Muslims in early North America, and the coexisting worlds of Christianity and conjuring in coastal Georgia and the links (with variations) to African practices.

A number of fascinating, memorable characters emerge, among them the defiant Mustapha Shaw, who felt entitled to land on Ossabaw Island and resisted its seizure by whites only to become embroiled in struggles with other blacks; Betty, the slave woman who, in the spirit of the American Revolution, presented a “list of grievances” to her master; and S’Quash, the Arabic-speaking Muslim who arrived on one of the last legal transatlantic slavers and became a head man on a North Carolina plantation.

Published in association with the Georgia Humanities Council.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780820343075
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Publication date: 11/15/2011
Series: Race in the Atlantic World, 1700-1900 Series , #51
Edition description: New Edition
Pages: 320
Product dimensions: 6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

ALLISON DORSEY is an associate professor of history at Swarthmore College.

BETTY WOOD is a Reader in American History, Girton College, University of Cambridge. Her other works include Slavery in Colonial America, 1619-1775 and Women's Work, Men's Work: The Informal Slave Economies of Lowcountry Georgia, 1750-1830 (Georgia).

JACQUELINE JONES is Truman Professor of American Civilization at Brandeis University. She is the author of Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family from Slavery to the Present, which won the 1986 Bancroft Prize, and The Dispossessed: America's Underclasses from the Civil War to the Present.

PAUL M. PRESSLY is director of the Ossabaw Island Education Alliance, a partnership between the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia, the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, and the Ossabaw Island Foundation.

VINCENT CARRETTA is professor emeritus of English at the University of Maryland. He is the author or editor of more than ten books, including scholarly editions of the writings of Olaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatley Peters, Ignatius Sancho, and Ottobah Cugoano. His books include Phillis Wheatley Peters: Biography of a Genius in Bondage; Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man; and The Life and Letters of Philip Quaque, the First African Anglican Missionary, coedited with Ty M. Reese (all Georgia). He lives in Springfield, Virginia.

PHILIP MORGAN is Harry C. Black Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. His book Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry won the Bancroft Prize and a number of other prestigious awards. His recent books include Black Experience and the Empire and Arming Slaves: From Classical Times to the Modern Age.

Table of Contents


Foreword
Paul Pressly
Introduction
Philip Morgan
Lowcountry Georgia and the Early Modern Atlantic World, 1733-ca. 1820
Philip Morgan
"High notions of their liberty": Women of Color and the American Revolution in Lowcountry Georgia and South Carolina, 1765-1783
Betty Wood
"I began to feel the happiness of liberty, of which I knew nothing before": Eighteenth-Century Black Accounts of the Lowcountry
Vincent Carretta
Africans, Culture, and Islam in the Lowcountry
Michael A. Gomez
"They shun the scrutiny of white men": Reports on Religion from the Georgia Lowcountry and West Africa, 1834-1850
Erskine Clarke
Reclaiming the Gullah-Geechee Past: Archaeology of Slavery in Coastal Georgia
Theresa A. Singleton
A Spirit of Enterprise: The African American Challenge to the Confederate Project in Civil War-Era Savannah
Jacqueline Jones
"The great cry of our people is land!" Black Settlement and Community Development on Ossabaw Island, Georgia, 1865-1900
Allison Dorsey
Summoning the Ancestors: The Flying Africans' Story and Its Enduring Legacy
Timothy Powell
A Sense of Self and Place: Unmasking My Gullah Cultural Heritage
Emory S. Campbell
Contributors
Index
A gallery of illustrations follows page

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"This is a fascinating and important collection. These thoughtful and incisive essays by an international team of interdisciplinary scholars illuminate a place and a past still palpable today, reminding us not only of the collective tragedies of slavery and segregation but also of the creation and evolution of the indomitable and beautiful Gullah-Geechee culture."—Charles Joyner, author of Down by the Riverside

"These ten excellent essays on the Gullah-Geechee people in the Georgia lowcountry enrich and complicate our understanding of the entire subject of American slavery and its legacies."—David Brion Davis, author of Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World

"This splendid collection illuminates an aspect of African American culture that has been neglected in the past."—Choice

“The ten essays collected in this volume are wide ranging both chronologically (from the eighteenth-century to the modern day) and methodologically, encompassing the disciplines of history, literature, and cultural studies. Together they provide a detailed and interesting insight into the worlds created by Africans in the lowcountry . . . This volume is to be welcomed and hopefully it will stimulate others to continue the work on this small part of Africa in America.”—American Historical Review

“All of the essays are well crafted, and several of them, particularly those by Vincent Carretta, Betty Wood, and Michael A. Gomez, are by themselves worth the price of the volume . . . This book greatly deepens our understanding of the life and culture of lowcountry blacks and is essential reading for all interested in the African experience in early America.”—Journal of American History

“Morgan does a superb job of linking Georgia to a larger Atlantic world….[and t]he contributors indeed are successful in offering a sustained, thoughtful balance of the history, culture, and people of this region.” —Daina Ramey Berry, Journal of Southern History

“Each essay in this collection exhibits a deep understanding of low country African American studies. . . .Despite this small caution, the volume deserves to reach a diverse readership of students, scholars, and laypeople.”—Hayden R. Smith, The South Carolina Historical Magazine

“Through a valuable assortment of methodological approaches and scholarly perspectives, African American Life in the Georgia Lowcountry demystifies aspects of African American life in this region.” —Brandon Byrd, Journal of African American History

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