Background
ROOTS 2009 again updates the very successful series of NEH Summer Seminars for College Teachers (all sponsored by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities [VFH]) . Americanist historians, literary critics, and other specialists have now reached the point of grounding research involving their own topics in the Americas in their broader contexts, often “Atlantic” ones, and there even including Africa. So also have Africanists begun to integrate their once-exotic “area studies” specializations in the broader academic disciplines in which they work. ROOTS is intended to allow specialists from both shores of the Atlantic to collaborate in furthering these promising openings.
The ROOTS 2009 Seminar, like its predecessors in 1998, 2001, 2003, 2005, and 2007, will introduce Africa before c. 1800 to instructors in colleges and universities throughout the United States to the history, literature, and culture – primarily, but not exclusively – of the Americas. It offers participants, often otherwise committed to heavy teaching responsibilities or focused on their primary fields, the opportunity to acquaint themselves with recent advances in complementing – in fact, integrally related – fields lying beyond their usual ranges. It will present Africans as contributors, on their own terms, to the formatively Atlantic and American experience of encountering dramatic human diversity, making them as vital to understanding the Americas – from the St. Lawrence to the Río de la Plata – as the customary accents on Elizabethan England or Philippine Castile. In North America, Africans were significant contributors to the composites of Natives and English, Scots, Irish, German, Hispanic, French, and other immigrants who, by the time of the early Republic, were becoming “Americans” together – however differentiated from one another they may have been as beneficiaries of the process of integration, and thus also however unrecognized these majorities have been to date in popular images of “America”. Elsewhere – in meso-America, the Caribbean, Brazil, and Andean lands – Africans made similarly vital (and until now similarly obscured) contributions. As in 2003, 2005, and 2007 the Seminar will primarily offer participants opportunities to develop personal research programs incorporating relevant aspects of Africa into work focused primarily on “American” studies.
The Seminar proceeds on the premise of trans-hemispheric contextualization: that is, that (particularly North) Americanists working on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries do so most effectively by taking account of the full Atlantic context of their fields, including Spanish America, (Portuguese) Brazil, and the Caribbean, as well as Africa and Europe. While retaining a certain focus on North America, ROOTS 2009 will also include participants working on issues involving Africans in the tropical Americas. The complementing responsibility of contextualization for Africanists is to think and write about their own, heretofore highly specialized subjects with knowledgeable reference to the broader Atlantic and American themes in which Africans in fact participated. Hence, places in the Seminar will be offered also (assuming suitable applicants) to Africanist-trained scholars seeking to reach out across the Atlantic from east to west. Seminar discussions across the boundaries of these three, or more, conventionally separated fields will thus be productive for participants from all specific regional backgrounds. The Seminar becomes a balanced and “Atlanticized” encounter in itself, parallel in engaged processing of others’ academic cultures to the trans-oceanic engagements of the earlier times under examination.
The emphases on trans-Atlantic conversations to be developed in the ROOTS Seminar for 2009 arise from the director’s extensive experience in interpreting the existing largely specialized Africanist literature for Americanists and from the recently thriving impetus to open up the conventional “national” histories, literatures, and cultures to their positions on global scales. Professional meetings, journals, and even monographs now routinely affirm the increased understanding of even localized or individual subjects of study that scholars gain from appreciation of the full diversity of the worlds in which everyone then lived, and the continuing presence of diversity manifested in the “culture wars” of modern societies.
Even so, the good and inclusive intentions of scholars not trained in African studies remain only modestly informed by current Africanist thinking. As Americanist studies have recognized and attempted to compensate for inherited negative images of Africa and Africans, for example, they have embraced positive, but exoticized and generic “Africans”: undifferentiated suffering “slaves”, or romanticized but abstracted and static “cultures”, implicitly cognate with inherited racial stereotyping as “black”. Such reductionist images of Africa’s past have the unfortunate effect of perpetuating the contemporary differences that they aim to overcome, on both sides of the Atlantic. They often further inhibit genuine understanding of earlier times by trying to “rehabilitate” “Africans” according to the familiar standards of the modern West that – while often appealing to students – obscure the distinctiveness of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century worlds of the people involved, again on both sides of the Atlantic. The Seminar proceeds on the historian’s premise that an emphasis on the distinctiveness of the past, if recognized, makes the early-modern Americas and Africa more accurately and sympathetically intelligible, and more relevant to contemporary concerns, and in all disciplinary registers. The Seminar thus enables scholars and teachers across the spectrum of American studies to understand genuine diversity, rather than inadvertently denying it, treating it not as a “problem” but rather as a primary humane value and as a vital source of the eclectic dynamism of the Americas.
Popular fascination with Africa now grips the contemporary United States through fictional and documentary depictions – beginning with Alex Haley’s Roots (1976) and the late-1970s television series based on the book, the more-recent novel (1987) and film of Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”, on through Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger (1992) – not to mention widespread use of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in English literature courses, and persistently gloomy journalistic mémoires of reportage from a “dark” and troubled continent. The slavery epoch is the focus of a steady stream of literary contemplations of the African-American experience by Robert Hayden, Caryl Phillips, and others. The film “Amistad”, Charles Johnson’s television series on “Africans in America”, other media presentations of later ante-bellum slavery, trans-racial family histories in the U.S. (e.g., the Balls and Hairstons), genetic evidence bearing on the Jefferson-Hemings relationship, assertions of the validity of living community memory against the abstract evidence of scholarship, and – most directly related to Africa – the PBS airing of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s “Wonders of the African World” (1999) confirm active public interest in this story (beyond the academic tempest that it also created). Recent attention has focused on the Browns and De Wolfes of Rhode Island, who made fortunes on the Atlantic trade in human beings; and the winner of the National Book Award for 2008 was, of course, Annette Gordon-Reed’s Hemingses of Monticello.
Museums around the world have devoted significant exhibitions to Atlantic history since the Smithsonian’s 1992 “Seeds of Change” and to the slave trade itself (the “Henrietta Marie” exhibit still touring the U.S., as well as other major exhibitions in Liverpool, Lisbon, Nantes, Oslo); and there have been other major recent museum exhibitions (e.g. the Mariners’ Museum, Newport News VA, 2002). In 1994, UNESCO inaugurated an international “Slave Route Project”, including participation by scholars and institutions in the U.S., with strong teaching, cultural, tourism, and other publicly oriented components. In Brazil and the Spanish-speaking nations of the Americas, long-obscure communities of African descent are claiming identities linked to Africa and asserting places for themselves in national politics. Currently growing debate, and a growing number of legal challenges, over “reparations” is further politicizing discussion of the era of the slave trade in and around the Atlantic to degrees that threaten to obscure concurrent gains in scholarly understanding and balanced presentation of the issues in classrooms all over the world. And much uglier racially based – more or less subtly – themes also surface in the media.
By identifying the thoughtful and accurate elements in the background of all these fashionable, often politicized, representations of Africa (and of Africans in the Americas), ROOTS 2009 will enable participants to develop their scholarly research along informed, responsible, and socially and culturally productive lines. The Seminar will thus present Africans as the whole people they were, in Africa and the Americas: men and women, mothers and children, Muslims and Christians, youths and elders, aristocrats and slaves (in Africa), all acting out of the specifics of their own positions, in their own times and places. We will distinguish not only Asante from Angolans, but also the 1670s from the 1760s, the demands made by tobacco cultivation from those of sugar cane or rice, African “Igbo” from American “Eboes”, Virginia plantations from the Louisiana frontier, isolated individuals from others living in viable communities, colonial Charleston (South Carolina) from Cartagena and New York City, and – especially – the peculiarities of Africans’ experiences in North America from those of others, in other parts of the Americas. Participants trained in American studies will confront African identities as distinguishable and recognizable as their own. Although drawing on theory as realized throughout this broad range of academic disciplines, the fundamental vision of the Seminar is humanistic and historical.
In highlighting all sides of the multilateral confrontations in the Americas, the Seminar aims to return participants to their home institutions equipped to present effectively the emerging vision of the history of the Americas as a crucible in which strangers of diverse, but comprehensible (to us), backgrounds worked out the tense accommodations that became the complex of cultures that today are the United States and other American nations. The notion of diversity as complementary rather than competitive and of identities as multiple and situational – and their strains – were not news to anyone from Africa. The epistemological foundations of the Seminar thus rest on a historicized vision of cultures as human strategies, on dialectical processes of engagement and change, and on the Americas as a (if not the only) site in which the global encounters of early modernity attained transformative intensities. Such a dialectical conceptualization demands “players” of comparable agencies from all shores of the Atlantic, and ROOTS 2009 will develop the majorities enslaved in the Americas – otherwise rendered passive or at best reactive to stereotyped domination – as people with histories, and hence identities and formative contributions, of their own.
