Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean: Irish, Africans, and the Construction of Difference by Jenny Shaw

The African Atlantic: West African Literatures and Slavery Studies Taiwo Adetunji Osinubi BOOKS REVIEWED Rebellious Histories: The Amistad Slave Revolt and the Cultures of Late Twentieth-Century Black Transnationalism ByMatthew J. Christensen Albany: State U of New York P, 2012. xiv + 188 pp. 9781438439709 paper. Metaphor and the Slave Trade in West African Literature By Laura T. Murphy Athens: Ohio UP, 2012. ix + 243 pp. 9780821419953 paper. SLAVERY STUDIES, COLONIALISM, AND AFRICAN LITERATURES Within African literary and cultural studies, work on the representations of domestic West African slavery or the historical slave trades across the Atlantic and the Sahara has been sparse. Laura Murphy and Matthew [End Page 149] Christensen address this paucity in two books with strikingly different perspectives and outcomes. Whereas Murphy focuses on metaphorization and veiled communications in representations of slavery, Christensen emphasizes direct contestations of slavery’s meanings and overt appropriations of symbolic narratives and icons that critique enslavement and its legacies of political and cultural dispossession. In his explicitly transnational study, Christensen examines the memorializations of the 1839 Amistad slave revolt in the United States and Sierra Leone as a site of contestation over the meanings of emancipation and political independence. Murphy studies representations of the slave trade in Ghanaian and Nigerian literatures. Both scholars examine texts and events from about the third decade of the nineteenth century to the first decade of the twenty-first century. In reading these contributions together, I frame my observations within an appraisal of the disjunctures among a globalizing slavery studies, African literary scholarship, studies of slavery narratives in the North Atlantic world, and the much researched study of slavery in the Americas. This wide gesture is necessary because as much as these books can be read as studies in African and African American literatures, they beckon toward larger cross-disciplinary conversations about the histories and representations of slavery, colonialism, and capitalism. Hitherto, most of the work on slavery in Africa has been produced outside literary scholarship. Such work, produced by historians, anthropologists, political scientists, legal scholars, and archeologists on the historical and contemporary practices of capture, enslavement, and bondage constitutes the cross-disciplinary field of slavery studies. Although much of the work in the field through the last three decades of the twentieth century was historical, the rise of contemporary slavery studies, the attention to human trafficking, and the increasing recognition of globalized labor exploitation have transformed historical slavery studies into contemporary global slavery studies. Increasingly, the slave trade is recognized as a globalizing force with multiple historical locations and participants. New and forthcoming journals and book series—such as the Journal of Global Slavery or Brill’s Studies in Global Slavery—continue to transform the field. It is thus imperative for scholars to historicize their studies of any form of slavery and slave trade within a larger landscape and temporality of co-extensive practices of enslavement and freedom. The transformations I list above influence my reading of Murphy and Christensen. While a simple Google search will reveal countless conferences and publications on the histories and forms of slavery and bondage in Africa, it will produce far fewer search results on the representations of slavery in African literatures. This disjuncture is historical. Slavery, the Atlantic slave trade, and abolition are acknowledged as catastrophic and traumatic events in Caribbean and American literatures. Hence, scholars studying representations of slavery in the Americas find a ready body of codified literatures overtly addressing its traumatic legacies. There is also a great interaction between scholars of Caribbean and American literatures of slavery and scholars of slavery studies in the Americas. Colonial conquest reconfigured Africa’s internal relationship to domestic slavery and the internal slave trades such that scholars of slavery in African literatures must take into account how colonialism impacted how slavery is remembered and represented. That is to say that all accounts of slavery and slave trade must be provincialized, i.e., taken out of any singularizing (North Atlantic or putatively global) narrative [End Page 150] and rescaled within a local nexus of meanings and historical mechanisms.1 For West African literatures, such provincializing gestures must take account of colonialism and its successor or related projects such as anticolonialism, independence, arrested decolonization...

Reviewed by: Amistad’s Orphans: An Atlantic Story of Children, Slavery, and Smuggling by Benjamin N. Lawrance Craig Hollander (bio) Amistad’s Orphans: An Atlantic Story of Children, Slavery, and Smuggling. By Benjamin N. Lawrance. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014. Pp. 376. Cloth, $85.00.) Many scholars are already familiar with the saga of the Africans from La Amistad. But don’t let such familiarity with the episode keep you from reading Benjamin N. Lawrance’s new book, Amistad’s Orphans: An Atlantic Story of Children, Slavery, and Smuggling. Focusing on African child slaves, the book provides a fresh perspective on both the Amistad affair and the illegal African slave trade to Cuba during the second quarter of the nineteenth century. With good reason, Lawrance takes issue with those who characterize the period as an “age of abolition.” On the contrary, he argues that it constituted “the beginning of an age of child enslavement” (7). In 1997, the superstar director Steven Spielberg released the film Amistad, which portrayed the ordeal of 53 African slaves who staged a successful insurrection onboard a Cuban slave ship called La Amistad in 1839. Although the Africans sought to sail the ship to Africa, they wound up near Long Island. They were detained in Connecticut and then subjected to a drawn-out legal battle for their liberty. Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Africans, enabling 35 of them to journey back to Africa in 1842. Not surprisingly, Spielberg’s spotlight on the Amistad affair drew both popular and scholarly attention. David Brion Davis began his book Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York, 2006) with a description of the famous revolt and the various legal issues surrounding it. And it was only a couple years ago that Marcus Rediker published The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom (New York, 2013). Lawrance recounts in Amistad’s Orphans the same narrative as previous works concerning the Amistad affair. And, at times, he tries to relitigate the case on behalf of the Africans (perhaps if only to demonstrate his exhaustive research into African dialects). For the most part, though, Lawrance’s book is only about the Amistad affair insofar as it produced sources about six children from Sierra Leone: Covey, Antonio, Ka’le, Te’me, Kag’ne, and Margru. Lawrance employs the extant information about these children—“Amistad’s orphans,” as he refers to them [End Page 846] collectively—to explore “the African child slave experience and [reevaluate] the centrality of child mobility to the massive illegal trafficking enterprise undergirding the nineteenth-century trans-Atlantic slave trade” (5). “With the requisite contextual information,” he assures, “the lives of Amistad’s orphans can, and do, speak to the broader experience of tens of thousands of others enslaved during the nineteenth century” (46). In Amistad’s Orphans, Lawrance asserts that the experience of African child slaves in the illegal slave trade has been “misunderstood” (5). He is being too generous. Few scholars have ever sought in earnest to understand whether African child slaves experienced the traffic differently than their adult counterparts. Yet children comprised a significant portion of the African slave trade (roughly one-fifth of the total number of captives). Moreover, the percentage of children in the traffic increased over time. By the second quarter of the nineteenth century—when the African slave trade to Cuba was purportedly illegal—children constituted more than a third of the total number of captives. Several scholars have suggested that this demographic shift must have resulted from a change on the supply (African) side. After all, wouldn’t most slave traders prefer to purchase adult males, rather than women and children? Not so, says Lawrance. “Slave children,” he contends, were “highly prized, specifically targeted, and exceptionally valuable investments” (29). The question, then, is why would traffickers want them? According to Lawrance, slave traders sought to purchase African children because they viewed child slaves as more “coercible” than adults— meaning that they were easier to enslave, more controllable, and less likely to rebel. It also stands to reason that such “coercibility” became more desirable during the illegal...

Meyerhold and the RevolutionA Reading through Henri Lefebvre's Theories on "Everyday Life" Stefan Aquilina (bio) In the memoirs of his work with Vsevolod Meyerhold, the actor Mikhail Sadovsky wrote how the director "aimed at wrenching the spectator out of the familiarity of everyday existence, attempted to rip off his comfortable house slippers."1 Ilya Ehrenburg, one of Meyerhold's literary collaborators, writes similarly: "Meyerhold hated stale water, yawning emptiness: he often resorted to masks precisely because he was terrified by them—and what he found terrifying in them was not some mystical fear of nonbeing, but the petrified vulgarity of everyday life."2 Signaled in these quotations is "everyday life," a critical area of knowledge that steadily gained importance throughout the twentieth century. Within pertinent critical discourses, everyday life is now treated not as a trivial and undistinguishable domain, what "we routinely consider unremarkable and thus take for granted," but as "the basis of meaningful experience."3 In this understanding of the everyday, daily activities such as walking, eating, and communicating become imbued with a sense of purpose that belies their repetitive and undistinguishable status. A crucial figure within these debates was Henri Lefebvre (1901–91), and the aim of this essay is to apply his theories to an evaluation of Meyerhold's place within the political and theatrical scenarios that developed in the first years after the 1917 October Revolution in Russia. This essay draws together for the first time the work of these two personalities, arguing that a Lefebvrian framework makes visible the tension between Meyerhold's support and critique of the emerging political status quo. It also repositions his aesthetic techniques and Biomechanical system as sites of body-based resistance. [End Page 7] The reading of Meyerhold's theatre through Lefebvre's theories qualifies this essay as an example of what Jackie Bratton refers to as "theorized theatre history," that is, an application of critical theory as a historiographical tool to challenge, partner, and ultimately interpret the historical content.4 Theoretical framing within historical studies has recently given rise to some constructive debate. For example, Thomas Postlewait is wary of historical studies that are, to his mind, excessively rooted in theory, which becomes an all-too-restrictive channel that binds rather than informs: "There are…scholars who champion a reigning idea, derived from this or that theory. All events are illustrations of the theory, which defines the contexts and controls the interpretation."5 Jim Davis, on the other hand, argues that theory is so ingrained in contemporary scholarship that it simply cannot be ignored; consequently, it is "far better to acknowledge the ideas that are influencing one's own opinions…than to assume naively that one is untouched by theoretical positions."6 This essay keeps an over-rigorous application of theory in check by identifying both congruencies and conflicts between Lefebvre and Meyerhold. In other words, Meyerhold's work will not always fit neatly within Lefebvre's theories, as the emphasis here will be less on establishing links between the two and more on contributing another layer to our understanding of the Russian director's work. In Lefebvre's theories, everyday life is a complex rather than straightforward phenomenon because it embraces "a wide range of tensions of contradictions."7 A similarly complex picture of Meyerhold's encounter with the revolution will emerge here, wherein certain actions of his will be seen as directly supporting the new regime even as others already contained the seeds of confrontation and resistance. This clarification of Meyerhold's complex rather than straightforward placement within the embryonic Bolshevik state is the first result of applying Lefebvre's theories. It will be supported by several sources by Meyerhold that are unavailable in English translations. The English-speaking world has been slow to add to Eduard Braun's Meyerhold on Theatre collection, which remains the most popular source of Meyerhold's texts and therefore deserved a recent reissue. Though traversing the director's whole career, Meyerhold on Theatre collects only some thirty texts, speeches, and rehearsal transcripts, a fraction compared to, for example, the four-volume collection edited in French by Beatrice Picon-Vallin.8 The Italian translations of Meyerhold's texts...

Reviewed by: Hoping for the Best, Preparing for the Worst: Everyday Life in Upper Canada, 1812–1814 by Dorothy Duncan Catharine Anne Wilson Hoping for the Best, Preparing for the Worst: Everyday Life in Upper Canada, 1812–1814. Dorothy Duncan. Toronto: Dundurn, 2012. Pp. 247. $21.99 On the two hundredth anniversary of the War of 1812, this book leaves political and military matters in the background and makes the everyday its focus. This is a refreshing departure from the scholarly and popular literature on the war, which has proliferated over the last few years. It is a mix of popular history and first-hand accounts, most of which were, it must be admitted, written by the elite at the time. Accounts of daily life written by ordinary folk have rarely survived. To make up for this and breathe life into the past, the author has created letters between two fictional sisters. Nearly two-thirds of the book explores life from the American Revolution up to the eve of the War of 1812. Duncan takes 131 pages to set the scene, implicitly arguing that Upper Canadians were ingenious, persevering, practical people who learned to make the most of their environment and who were concerned primarily about providing for [End Page 147] their families. They put these qualities to good use when war entered their lives. Though they were reluctant to leave their farms to fight, when their families and property were threatened they displayed their loyalty and bravery in helping to push back the invaders. It is a comforting story full of familiar characters such as Mrs Simcoe, the Rev John Strachan, Molly Brant, “Tiger” Dunlop, and Laura Secord. Short chapters read like a series of vignettes each highlighting a few individuals from different walks of life and parts of the province, and including lengthy excerpts from letters, diaries, travel journals, and business records. Many of these primary accounts have been published before, but they are now brought together in this book. They cover a wide range of experiences, from provisioning soldiers at Fort Niagara to clearing land in Glengarry County to falling in love with Captain Bird. Dorothy Duncan, one of Canada’s foremost culinary historians, author of the award-winning Canadians at Table: Food, Fellowship, and Folklore; A Culinary History of Canada and other works, not surprisingly spends a great deal of attention on food. This is one of the strengths of the book, as the author sits down at one dinner table after another, letting the reader feast on boiled black squirrel with Elizabeth Simcoe in Niagara or select marzipan figures over peppermint pastilles in a confectionery on King Street in York. Stories amuse, such as the one about a friendly dinner between British and American soldiers eight days after war had been declared. One chapter is devoted to recipes such as spruce beer, dandelion wine, and Michilimackinac stew. Another chapter delves into folk cures found in recipe books, such as cedar bark to cure scurvy and wet tobacco applied to bee stings. The author intermittently comments on the impact that war had on everyday life: teachers had to leave school to enlist, the transport of furs and provisions was disrupted, and families had to constantly balance their duty to defend Upper Canada with the necessity to plant and harvest crops, and to protect and ensure the survival of their families. Their everyday lives were interrupted with worrying about their loved ones who were away fighting, and watching apprehensively for approaching American troops and raiding parties, or even the British regulars and Native allies who sometimes transformed citizens’ homes and barns into headquarters and hospitals. The most cleverly conceived chapter is one that begins in a parlour where young women are creating a banner and traces that banner through the events of war, its hiding place underground during the invasion of York, and its glorious retrieval and carriage through every engagement of the 3rd York Regiment thereafter. The four fictional letters created by the [End Page 148] author also help show the progressive impact of the war on Martha, who was hired help at an Inn on Yonge Street. Martha writes to her sister of her duties...

Reviewed by: Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage by Sowande' M. Mustakeem Alex Borucki (bio) Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage. By Sowande' M. Mustakeem. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016. Pp. xvii, 262. $95.00 cloth; $25.95 paper) This innovative book broadens the emergent scholarship on the slave trade by emphasizing the experiences of women and children [End Page 113] who endured the forced Atlantic crossings alongside adult African men. Inspired by the works of Stephanie Smallwood, Saidiya Hartman, and Marcus Rediker, this book situates the slave vessel at the center of the process of commodification of humans, or as the author defines it, the "making and unmaking of black bodies" (p. 7). Thus, this work provides new interpretations about the intersection of violence and capitalism in the history of the slave trade. The structure of this book follows others that often begin in Africa, continue with sections about African experiences in slave ships, and finish with the sale of captives in the Americas. The first chapter examines the process of enslavement in Africa, where the interaction of white merchants and African elites led to the "production of terrorizing environments" (p. 34). There, the white quest for financial gains as well the transformation of these profits into political power by African elites fractured African social and normative ways of reverence for human life. Chapter two, which focuses on how white merchants and captains marketed black bodies, examines white imaginings of slaves as commodities rather than the African experiences of starvation, cruelty, and death in slave vessels, all of which the author analyzes later in the third chapter. Entitled "Blood Memories," chapter four portrays slave ships not only as floating prisons but also as "mobile battlefields," as it provides details about slave resistance and particularly the role of captive women in these insurrections (p. 77). Chapter five moves to one the most extreme forms of resistance, suicide in slave vessels, through the examination of familial separation of captives and the gendering of psychological instability. The following chapter enriches our understanding of Africans experiencing diseases in these ships. Often deemphasized by other studies, an examination of the violent environment surrounding the sale of captives in the Americas after disembarkation forms the final chapter of the book. This concluding chapter focuses on less-studied populations like children and aged captives, who could become "refuse slaves" in the brutal market of human flesh. This excellent work illustrates the paradoxical significance of U.S. [End Page 114] slavery studies in relation to the larger African Diaspora. Even though the importance of slavery studies in the United States has encouraged scholarship on this subject in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe, normative U.S. understandings of the African experiences in the Atlantic world sometimes mischaracterize these historical processes. For instance, the use of the term "Middle Passage" in this book, to encapsulate the experiences of captives in all slave vessels, exemplifies these Anglo-American normative views. As readily available research shows, more enslaved Africans arrived in Brazil than in the British Caribbean and the United States combined, and the same is true for the Spanish Americas, where more captives arrived than in the British colonies. Neither the Atlantic crossing of captives to Brazil or to the Spanish Americas fit the term "Middle Passage" based on the triangular trade, given that most of the slave voyages arriving in Brazil were bi-modal (departing from Brazil to Africa and then back to Brazil). And for the slave voyages arriving in the Spanish colonies, most of them involved some intercolonial and transimperial routes (e.g., from British Jamaica to Spanish Veracruz) in combination with forced treks across Mexico and South America. Even Cuba was part of these complicated slave trade networks before the emergence of the nineteenth-century Cuban-based traffic. This may be seen as a critique about the scope rather than the interpretation of this book, as the analysis of this work pushes new, exciting boundaries for scholars examining the slave trade outside of the United States and the British Caribbean. To be fair, the author acknowledges her lack of engagement with the history...

This chapter focuses on various and comparative experiences of different populations of women in unfree labor systems in the early modern Atlantic world, beginning with indigenous women in the Americas who suffered the violent consequences of Spanish conquest. It discusses gendered contexts shaping slavery in West Africa, the Caribbean, and South America; the expansion of the Atlantic slave trade; and the consequences for unfree and free women in different communities of North America during the period of international trade in human beings. It centers the experience of sexual exploitation inherent in labor systems in which women brokered no power over their bodies and reproductive lives, elucidating the limitations of archives in which women’s perspectives are largely silenced. Efforts at evacuating the lives of marginalized women from the silences in the archives have offered new insights into women’s lives and changed understandings about everyday experience in the early modern Atlantic world.

Return of the Repressed?"Haunted Castles" in Seventeenth-Century Munster Andrew Tierney (bio) The ragged silhouette of the haunted castle has formed the iconic backdrop to the Gothic novel for well over two centuries and retains an enduring presence within the horror genre to the present day. 1 The literature propagating this imagery during the eighteenth century has its roots in the religious and political turmoil that established the Protestant ascendancy. Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto, perhaps the first recognizable Gothic novel, imagines an archaic and superstitious Catholic world—one that Protestantism had supposedly rejected. Its themes of violence, usurpation, and repression resonate with the religious conflict and mass dispossessions of seventeenth-century Ireland in particular, and its dramatic castle setting was inspirational to later novelists dealing directly with Irish history. 2 For this reason Ireland has been seen as uniquely attuned to the Gothic, with its volatile history feeding the insecurities of the ruling class and [End Page 7] prompting complex literary excursions into the past. 3 Theorists have argued that a perpetual fear of Catholic retribution permeates the Anglo-Irish novel, and recently Jarlath Killeen has posited The Irish Rebellion (1646) by Sir John Temple as the foundational text in the formation of the Protestant literary tradition in Ireland. 4 Despite these claims, little attention has been given to accounts of "haunted castles" in the period preceding the eighteenth century, narratives of which can be found in pamphlets, letters, and memoirs. This article examines three separate accounts of hauntings in Irish castles during the mid-seventeenth century and proposes that they present meaningful precursors to the political and religious discourse found in the literary gothic a century later. In broad terms the aesthetic origins of the haunted castle can be traced to the seventeenth century when castles were being decommissioned as military tools. As these structures became increasingly unfashionable in domestic style, Renaissance advocates of classicism quickly labeled them with the denigratory term "Gothick." The various religious wars of the century—their last military engagements—finally consigned castles to ruination across Ireland; they joined the monasteries in providing the theme of memento mori for poets, painters, and novelists of the following century. Dark and emotive associations between the old religion and the old architecture came to underpin the revival of the "Castle Style" in both Britain and Ireland in the eighteenth century. 5 The exuberant architectural fantasies of revivalist pioneers such as Walpole and, later, William Beckford fetishized Catholicism as part of an aesthetic ensemble of horror; what emerged was a distinctly Protestant gaze upon the vestiges of an older religion. Amid the political and religious turmoil of early seventeenth-century Ireland, castles remained powerful symbols of long-established lineages and bastions of Catholic power. But explicit expressions of religious affiliation became increasingly internalized in the years of [End Page 8] Protestant supremacy following the "Flight of the Earls" in 1607; only discreet resistance to new Protestant power could be expressed, such as the carved Counter-Reformation motifs that appear in the Munster territories of the dispossessed Catholic Earls of Desmond. 6 Most notable during the mid-seventeenth century was the use of the Jesus monogram "I. H. S." associated with the Jesuits, leaders of the Counter-Reformation. 7 Expanding on the work of James Delle, Colm Donnelly has discussed the surviving example at Gortnatubbrid, Co. Limerick, in the context of the aftermath of the Desmond plantation. 8 That motif also appears at Ronayn's Court, Co. Cork, in 1624, a building commissioned by Morris Ronayn and his wife Margaret Gould, 9 and in the same year—outside Munster—at the castle of Teig Ó Daly at Killimor, Co. Galway. In the latter example the monogram accompanies various symbols of the passion of Christ, making visual the core Catholic belief in redemption through sacrifice and penance. Since no full survey of these inscriptions has been carried out, it is as yet difficult to determine how widespread they may have been. Donnelly, however, has pointed to parallels in the northeast of Scotland, where similar inscriptions occur during the same period in the context of new building by Catholic families. 10 Such covert religious iconography hints at the quiet spiritual...

Reviewed by: Racism in Modern Russia: From the Romanovs to Putin by Eugene M. Avrutin Kimberly St. Julian Varnon (bio) Eugene M. Avrutin, Racism in Modern Russia: From the Romanovs to Putin (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022). 140 pp., ill. Index. ISBN: 978-1-350-09728-5. Eugene M. Avrutin's Racism in Modern Russia: From the Romanovs to Putin is a new release in Bloomsbury's Russian Shorts series. The brief, easy-to-read monograph is a timely and excellent addition to the literature on race and racism in Russia and the Soviet Union. The volume begins with the 2013 Biryulevo protests, which remain a frightening reminder of the power of racism in driving violence against Central Asians in contemporary Russia. Avrutin uses Biryulevo to underscore how Central Asian migrants in Russia are racialized as Black and how the Russian crowds use inflammatory, white supremacist language to mark Central Asians and Caucasians as others (P. 3). From these scenes, the reader learns that "Russia for Russians" and other racist sentiments are not new but a continuation of racialization and othering of ethnic minorities dating back to the tsarist period of Russian history. The introduction also provides readers with a cursory but helpful overview of the treatment of race in the secondary literature in Russian [End Page 377] and Soviet history. Avrutin argues that due to Russia's lack of an overseas empire, its absence in both the African slave trade and the Scramble for Africa, and the international image of the anti-racist Soviet Union, racism and racial thinking in Russia have often been overlooked in academic discourse. He correctly points out that race has often been portrayed as a nonissue in Soviet historiography. He asks: What factors account for this silence (dismissing race-based thought and practices)? Why have scholars shown so little interest in historical and theoretical discussions of race? (P. 4). Avrutin powerfully demonstrates that racial ideologies and racial hierarchies have been part of Russian cultural and social history throughout the 150 years that his book covers. From the premise of the "messy" color line – one in which the ideas and process of racialization are not fixed nor stable – Avrutin diagrams for readers the forms and functions of race in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. He argues that race did not dictate citizenship or social position in Russia or the Soviet Union, "but by rejecting the premise that an individual could belong to multiple identities, the state's classification system primed people to see the world in unambiguous racial terms" (P. 7). Thus, the classification and ordering of groups within the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union according to nationality or ethnicity can be better contextualized in a paradigm of race. The book is organized chronologically into four chapters. Chapter 1, "The Empire's Races," relates the development of anthropological and "scientific" thinking on race in the ethnically and culturally diverse Russian Empire. The chapter also places Russia within Western European discourses on race and racial differences in the nienteenth century. One of the most interesting sections of this chapter examines how Russian anthropologists and race ideologues approached Jews and other ethnic minorities within the empire. Race scientists such as the anthropologist Aleksei Arsen'evich Ivanovskii were confounded by Russia's Jewish population and categorized them as a distinct, non-Russian, race. Imperial expansion merged with the development of social sciences making the myriad of ethnic groups within the empire's borders a boon for Russian anthropologists and reified the idea that Russia was unique relative to its European imperial counterparts. Chapter 2, "Boundaries of Exclusion," builds on the previous chapter's explanation of how race and racial difference were discussed and applied in academics and research. It explores the execution of racialization through how Russianness was defined and utilized by the [End Page 378] tsar and the imperial government to engender public support, maintain political order, and oppress minority nationalities. This chapter draws on Avrutin's expertise in Jewish history with a fascinating discussion of the 1913 Beilis trial that ties the Russian reaction to the case to similar racist attitudes in the United States toward African Americans in the post–Reconstruction Era. Another...

Reviewed by: Not a Catholic Nation: The Ku Klux Klan Confronts New England in the 1920s by Mark Paul Richard William Vance Trollinger Jr. Not a Catholic Nation: The Ku Klux Klan Confronts New England in the 1920s. By Mark Paul Richard. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015. 296pp. $28.95. Much has been written in the last few decades about the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, a national (unlike its post-Civil War predecessor) organization with an estimated four million members at its zenith. Mark Paul Richard—professor of history and Canadian studies at [End Page 84] SUNY-Plattsburgh—has now provided an important addition to this growing historiography. The first substantive examination of the Klan in New England, Richard’s Not a Catholic Nation makes clear that the KKK was active and aggressive in the region, and that Catholics were equally active and aggressive in their resistance. Not a Catholic Nation is organized on a state-by-state basis, starting with two chapters on Maine and then moving southward. As a result it occasionally feels repetitive, given the similarities in Klan activities and Catholic responses from state to state. That said, Not a Catholic Nation is a delight to read, in good part because Richard has mined a great variety of sources—including local and regional newspapers, including French-language newspapers, and state government documents—for details that make for a richly textured monograph. There are the 200 Klansmen who infiltrated three companies of the Rhode Island militia. There are the inebriated Vermont Klansmen who broke into Burlington’s Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception searching for the “‘ammunition, acid, gas, and guns’“ that could “‘blow up all the Protestants in New England”; not finding the explosive stash, they contented themselves with “stealing a crucifix, tools, vestments, and candles” (82–83). Particularly bizarre is the story of a Maine KKK leader who—in an earlier incarnation as a hypnotist—was challenged at a public demonstration to prove that his patient was really hypnotized; the future King Kleagle responded by having a large stone placed on the patient’s chest, which was then struck with a sledgehammer. As the Boston Herald reported, “the patient never came out of the trance, passing on quietly into the next world” (20). Not a Catholic Nation rightly pays a good deal of attention to French-Canadians and their descendants as particular targets of Klan vitriol. Not surprisingly, when French Catholics were able to work together with Irish Catholics—as seems to have happened at the grass-roots level in Massachusetts—they had more success in combating the Klan than when they were divided, as in Rhode Island. Interestingly, and in an important interpretive addendum to our understanding of the [End Page 85] Klan, Richard argues that the Klan did not see all immigrants from the north as targets. The KKK radically modified its anti-immigration stance to “enlist the support of foreign-born Protestants, such as Anglo-Canadians, as they confronted New England’s Catholic population, much of it consisting of French-Canadian descendants” (202). While the Canada-U.S. borderlands makes this story different from the KKK story elsewhere, in the main the New England Klan looks like the Klan elsewhere. This is even true when it comes to the matter of demographics: while the author claims that “this book will challenge notions that the KKK was active . . . predominantly where white Protestant majorities existed” (4), the only state where Catholics were a majority (53.8%) was Rhode Island. It seems that the other five states of the region fit pretty well into the general argument that—outside the South—the most active Klans were to be found where there was a Protestant majority and a significant Catholic minority. Actually, this point—that the Klan in New England was a lot like the Klan elsewhere in the North and West—is in good part what makes Not a Catholic Nation such an important work. In the introduction, Richard explicitly positions himself against scholars who have “downplayed the Protestant Klan’s expressions of hostility toward minority groups,” instead portraying the KKK as a conventional civic organization (4). As opposed to this Rotarians-with...

Reviewed by: So Conceived and So Dedicated: Intellectual Life in the Civil War–Era North ed. by Lorien Foote and Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai J. Matthew Gallman (bio) So Conceived and So Dedicated: Intellectual Life in the Civil War–Era North. Edited by Lorien Foote and Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Pp. 307 Cloth, $105.00; paper $45.00.) This volume contains eleven essays about Civil War–era intellectuals. Any study of intellectual life invites questions about definitions. Lorien Foote offers a useful starting point. These essays are about “educated [End Page 137] people for whom ideas mattered” (2). Foote and her fellow coeditor, Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai, have assembled a superb volume in which the pieces fit together wonderfully. Joan Waugh’s short, charming, and absolutely essential foreword sets the stage. Waugh establishes the centrality of George Fredrickson’s magisterial The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (1965) in framing any conversation about the intellectual history of the Civil War, while discussing her own “heavily marked” copy of Fredrickson’s slim volume. Waugh reminds us that Fredrickson the brilliant scholar was also a charming fellow who had no trouble with young scholars who—like Waugh herself—“differed and departed from” the narrative set forth in The Inner Civil War. Nearly every essay in So Conceived and So Dedicated mentions Fredrickson, but none of the authors is intent on merely filling lacunae in the foundational text, and none are set on tearing it down—which, one imagines, is precisely how Fredrickson would have had it. Lorien Foote leads off with a historiographical review of the state of the field, with comments on the other ten essays placed within that larger analysis. This wonderful essay deserves attention on its own, as well as for being an introduction to what is to come. Foote considers three crucial questions that have framed the scholarship since the publication of The Inner Civil War: Did the Civil War shift intellectual thought toward modernization? Did it lead intellectuals to embrace “authoritarian modes of thought” (8)? How did the Civil War shape notions of nationalism? Foote’s essay and notes reward careful reading. The questions, methods, and voice employed in the other ten essays are diverse, but the pieces join together in multiple conversations. The authors interact with one another implicitly, and on multiple occasions they explicitly engage with other essays in the volume. The mix of senior scholars and more junior authors is excellent. Together they map out some of the ways scholars are rethinking intellectual history in the Civil War era. Kathryn Shively Meier considers the medical professionals who became involved in the United States Sanitary Commission, while—in a marvelously complementary piece—Susan-Mary Grant looks at the thoughts and experiences of those surgeons who actually worked for the military. In an interesting counter to some familiar narratives, Julie Mujic asks how professors in midwestern universities responded to the particular challenges they faced when their pupils clamored to go to war. Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai flips that tale by considering how antebellum and wartime experiences shaped the postwar activities of three prominent soldiers-turned-educators. [End Page 138] Other authors adopt comparable forms of collective biography, contemplating selected members of key groups. Christian G. Samito examines two Irish Catholics who became prominent prowar Republicans, while William Kurtz finds generally conservative impulses in the writings of a cohort of Catholic editors and archbishops. David Zimring complicates our understanding of the relationship between geography and identity by examining northerners who moved south and largely embraced the politics of their adopted home. Two essays focus on a single figure. Richard F. Miller uncovers the crusade of one New England lawyer to produce empirically sound, fundamentally nonpartisan historical writing about the war; Niki Lefebvre broadens the interpretive lens with a close reading of one artist’s representation of an African American soldier in Harper’s Weekly. Finally, Richard Newman’s intellectually challenging contribution looks at metaphorical discourse surrounding the health of the body politic to reconsider thoughts on the meaning of race and emancipation both during and after the war. These essays should produce scores of “heavily marked” copies for decades to come. Consider just two...

Reviewed by: Not Made by Slaves: Ethical Capitalism in the Age of Abolitionby Bronwen Everill Rebecca Shumway (bio) Slavery, Capitalism, Free produce, Abolition, Trade, West Africa Not Made by Slaves: Ethical Capitalism in the Age of Abolition. By Bronwen Everill. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020. Pp. 328. $39.95.) The transatlantic relationships that developed among Europeans, Africans, and Americans during the formation of the Atlantic world changed in important and complex ways at the dawn of the nineteenth century. The most widely noted of those changes stemmed from Britain and the U.S.A.'s abolition of the trade in captives from Africa; the Haitian and [End Page 151]other Atlantic Revolutions; and technological innovations associated with industrialization. Other profound changes in intercontinental transatlantic relations were less visible, and, in many respects, less linear in their evolution. This is especially true of ideological changes among Europeans and Americans with regard to Africa and unfree labor. In Not Made by Slaves, Bronwen Everill delves into these murkier waters surrounding abolitionist ideologies, so-called legitimate commerce, the formation of racialized nationalist identities, and proto-imperial positioning by the governments of Britain and the U.S.A. vis-a-vis West Africa. The book shows how present-day notions about the ethics of consumerism, including "fair-trade" commodities, socially conscious corporate practices, and considerations of inequity in the relationships between producers and consumers, originated in this era in tandem with other better-known transformations within the connective tissues of the Atlantic world. The book's seven chapters are organized thematically and discuss topics such as important commodities of transatlantic trade in this period (tobacco, cotton, sugar), commercial brands and branding, credit and debt, and nationalism. Everill's Introduction describes the vast historiography relevant to the study as well as some of the principal places, individuals, and trading firms discussed in the text, and summarizes each chapter. While the precise argument of the book remains somewhat elusive here, the Introduction clearly links the book's subject matter to the modern-day issue of ethical consumption. Similarly, the Epilogue stops short of drawing specific conclusions about the historical matter covered in the book but reviews the contradictions and complexities described in previous chapters and stresses that these are inherent in both past and present attempts to make international commerce simultaneously ethical and profitable. Not Made by Slavesstands out from other scholarly studies of nineteenth-century abolitionism and economics by deliberately including a West African perspective on the commercial, political, and ideological changes associated with the ending of the transatlantic slave trade and the development of new export streams from West Africa. While Everill's analysis of West African historical developments is rather slim compared to her discussion of how British and American abolitionists envisioned what ethical trade with Africa might look like, she provides concrete examples of antislavery sentiment and consumer consciousness among West Africans during this era. In the mostly Islamic hinterland of Senegambia, for [End Page 152]instance, some African rulers prohibited the sale of enslaved people to Europeans because they opposed trading with Christians. They sometimes also stamped out the market for imported alcohol and tobacco for religious reasons. In Sierra Leone and Liberia, a variety of settlers, missionaries, and colonial agents pursued antislavery agendas. They called international attention to the widespread use of slave labor in producing and transporting the "legitimate" African trade goods upon which British and American commerce there depended. Everill provides even more significant insight into the African side of this story when explaining the ideological shift that occurred toward the middle of the nineteenth century among Britons and Americans regarding unfree labor. As white people in these countries invested more and more in the belief that they were both culturally and biologically superior to other people, they also became more comfortable with the notion of "domestic slavery" in Africa and other places inhabited by people of color. Political and business leaders in Britain, in particular, were committed to the notion that overseas commerce was an important and necessary means of expanding Christian influence and what they considered "civilization" to what they considered the more "barbaric" parts of the world. This belief, in turn, fueled...

Reviewed by: The Catholic Church and the Campaign for Emancipation in Ireland and England by Ambrose Macaulay Thomas Bartlett The Catholic Church and the Campaign for Emancipation in Ireland and England. By Ambrose Macaulay. (Dublin: Four Courts Press. Distributed by International Specialized Book Services, Portland, OR. 2016. Pp. 416. $74.50. ISBN 978-1-84682-600-9.) It cannot be said that the Irish Catholic campaign for ‘Emancipation’ has been ignored by historians. James A. Reynold’s pioneering analysis of the mass movement that led to the eligibility of Irish Catholics to sit in the Westminster Parliament (Yale University Press, 1954) was supplemented by Fergus O’Farrell’s study of the local sources of O’Connellite support during the 1820s (Dublin, 1984). Nor has the life of Daniel O’Connell, the campaign’s leader, been neglected. Oliver MacDonagh’s magisterial two-volume biography (London, 1988, 1989) of the ‘Liberator,’ as O’Connell was quickly dubbed, can be set alongside the more recent two-volume study by Patrick Geoghegan (Dublin, 2008, 2010) and, easily overlooked, a fine short piece by Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh in the Dictionary of Irish Biography (Cambridge, 2010). Is there really anything left to be said? To that question Ambrose Macaulay has delivered a resounding yes, and he has produced a well-documented volume to be placed together with the earlier authorities. In doing so, Macaulay—a parish priest in the Diocese of Down and Connor and author of a number of well-received biographies of leading Catholic clergymen—highlights probably the most bizarre outcome of the century of Penal Laws to which Irish Catholics and the Irish Catholic Church were subjected. As the dismantling of the Penal Laws proceeded fitfully from the 1770s on, the Catholic Church that finally emerged into the daylight was not only unbroken but largely unbowed; indeed, there were those who claimed that the Church was in fact strengthened by its time in the darkness of the Penal era. By 1800 when the Penal curtain was finally cast aside, the Irish Catholic Church was revealed to be entirely beyond the control of the British government. At that time in every country in Europe—Protestant or Catholic—the state demanded and received a say, great or small, in the appointment of bishops, and all states aspired to oversight of episcopal correspondence. In some states, the clergy were in receipt of government pay. However, in Ireland the Catholic Church was beyond the reach of a British government, which, gallingly, had no role in Catholic episcopal appointments, no power to scrutinize episcopal correspondence, and no control over the clergy’s pay. [End Page 166] The resolution of this matter, and of other issues including appropriate oaths to be taken by Catholics to avail of the new post-Penal Laws dispensation, and the question of state pay for Catholic clergy forms the substance of Macaulay’s study. To accompany the repeal of the Penal Laws, successive British governments insisted on ‘insurance’ in the form of oaths denouncing alleged Catholic beliefs— inter alia, that it was fine to murder a Protestant Prince, and that no faith need be kept with heretics—and a say in episcopal appointments as well as some oversight of Vatican-Ireland correspondence. As a result Catholic bishops in both Ireland and in Britain had no option but to become fully involved in a campaign to maintain their independence from the Protestant state, as well as safeguard their position with respect to the Catholic laity only too willing to challenge episcopal authority. Utilizing an enormous array of documentation, much of it from the Vatican Archives but also including diocesan archives throughout Britain and Ireland, Macaulay offers an authoritative guide through the Irish bishops’ efforts to be accommodating toward the British government while at the same time remaining beyond its control. He tells this story in a masterful way, and for those interested in episcopal diplomacy (and rancor) this study has much to offer. John Milner, vicar apostolic of the Midland District and an ‘indomitable controversialist’ (p. 355) and self-appointed scourge of any backsliding on episcopal independence, inevitably figures large in this account, but so too does Cardinal Ercole Consalvi, a key Vatican diplomat during...

Reviewed by: With Malice Toward Some: Treason and Loyalty in the Civil War Era by William A. Blair Stephen E. Towne (bio) With Malice Toward Some: Treason and Loyalty in the Civil War Era. By William A. Blair. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. Pp. 432. $40.00 cloth) William A. Blair’s commendable study shows how a popular [End Page 121] understanding of treason dominated Union government policies and practices toward southern rebels and perceived disloyalists in the North during the Civil War and immediate postwar years. Under the U.S. Constitution, treason is narrowly defined. Moreover, prior to the war, the crime had rarely been tried in the courts. But the unprecedented challenges of civil war prompted Unionists from all walks of life to paint dissenting speech and other acts as treason. Consequently, governing authorities assembled makeshift and inefficient mechanisms to police the country using broad, often imprecise, definitions of loyalty and treason. In short order, the U.S. Army took the lead as the enforcer of an elastic understanding of loyalty and disloyalty, as well as deciding when non-action was just as bad as a traitorous act. Although learning quickly that treason is difficult to prosecute, the army resolutely plowed ahead and arrested northern newspaper editors for publishing disloyalty or detained civilians for discouraging enlistments or encouraging desertion. Congress helped by passing laws giving authorities new tools to enforce the popular views of treason and the disloyal. Blair outlines a period when numerous arrests for perceived disloyal speech or treasonous acts occurred throughout the northern states, as both civil and military authorities took their cues from community norms of thought, speech, and behavior. After the Union prevailed and the victorious army occupied the former Confederate states, government policies to punish rebel treason yielded to leniency as northern Democrats and Republicans jockeyed either to regain power or retain primacy. Blair’s discussion of a wartime federal government that failed to stand up for civil liberties for all citizens but yielded to common sentiments of retribution and partisan bloodlust might seem to point the finger of blame at President Abraham Lincoln. Although references to Lincoln are many, he is not the central figure in the book. The army and Union people generally are the main actors who are faulted. As Blair notes, the president and his cabinet “were interested in finding the practical tools to win the war, while ensuring that they maintained a toe in the water of constitutional plausibility” (p. 4). [End Page 122] Lincoln, while characterized by Blair as a strong leader, succumbed to subordinate officials, especially military commanders, and allowed them to employ popular, not constitutional, standards to dictate how they punished both northern and southern treason. Although an insightful work, Blair’s analysis is in some ways a work of synthesis. Frequently cited are historians Mark E. Neely Jr. and Jonathan W. White, as well as political scientist Richard F. Bensel, who has published on military interference in voting during the war. Blair uses many primary sources but mostly cites those published or available on microfilm or online (e.g., the well-known Official Records series and newspapers). He could have bolstered his arguments and avoided a number of factual errors had he cited unpublished army records in the National Archives and steered clear of the corpus of historian Frank L. Klement, whose works on the “copperheads” (antiwar Democrats) in the Midwest are replete with errors. Blair’s account of their conspiracies in Indiana and neighboring states, based on Klement, unfortunately repeats them. As well, readers of the Register will want to know that archival records show the army arrested and banished Kentucky lieutenant governor Richard T. Jacob not merely for speaking against recruiting African American slaves as troops, as Blair argues, but because army spies reported that he was in communication with leaders of the Sons of Liberty, a secret organization that planned armed insurrection in the commonwealth and across the Ohio River. These shortcomings aside, Blair has produced a thoughtful work that Civil War scholars will study with profit. [End Page 123] Stephen E. Towne STEPHEN E. TOWNE is associate university archivist at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis and...

Reviewed by: Rebellious Passage: The “Creole” Revolt and America’s Coastal Slave Trade by Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie Michael A. Schoeppner (bio) Rebellious Passage: The “Creole” Revolt and America’s Coastal Slave Trade. By Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. 345. Cloth, $99.99; paper $29.99.) Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie’s book is not the first study of the 1841 slave revolt aboard the Creole, but it is the best. While it includes the story of the nineteen individuals who led the revolt and the story of the diplomatic exchanges by well-known American and British politicians, neither group occupy center stage as they do in previous works. Rather, Kerr-Ritchie’s is an ensemble cast. He provides painstaking detail for his wide range of characters: the slave traders who invested in the American maritime slave trade, the Creole’s crew and “cargo,” the black Bahamians who escorted the formerly enslaved people ashore, British colonial officers, American and British diplomats, and even the lawyers who later litigated the insurance claims in Louisiana’s courtrooms. [End Page 258] Kerr-Ritchie deploys this large cast of characters to situate the Creole revolt within a broad political, social, and economic context. In the first and third chapters, for example, he explains the divergent trajectories of the American and British empires with regard to the slave trade and, eventually, slavery itself. The geographic proximity of the two empires, especially the British Caribbean and the American South, meant that these diverging political regimes were in frequent contact. The Creole, then, did not just sail the treacherous waters between Florida and the Bahamas, it traveled between two starkly different and increasingly antagonistic political regimes. Likewise, the second chapter situates the fateful Creole voyage within the broader scope of the American maritime slave trade. Kerr-Ritchie aptly demonstrates the continuity of the maritime slave trade before and after 1808. Enslaved people’s experiences of detachment, dread, and violence in the transatlantic slave trade had their counterparts in the interstate maritime trade. The fourth chapter traces the actual brig Creole from its initial construction to its ultimate demise in 1842. The boat was constructed to be an ideal interstate conveyor of enslaved people. Slave trading was big business, and merchant houses, insurance companies, and banking institutions all contributed to its maintenance. So, while readers have to wait more than one hundred pages to reach the actual revolt, they are better prepared to understand it. The Creole rebels might have been an aberration insofar as successful slave “mutinies” go, but the diplomacy of slavery and the interstate maritime slave were anything but aberrational; they sat at the heart of antebellum America. All of this contextual work lays the foundation for Kerr-Ritchie’s recounting of the rebellion and its massive reverberations. While much of the actual revolt is well known, Rebellious Passage offers the reader something important and new by placing people of color at the center of the postrevolt story, not just at the violent climax. The rebels who overtook the ship chose to head for British territory. Once reaching Bahamian waters, the formerly enslaved people decided to leave the vessel and seek protection from British authorities. The British West Indian regiment of black soldiers secured the vessel while diplomats debated the appropriate course of action. Everyday black Bahamians, many working on small watercraft, facilitated the enslaved people’s flight from the ship and forced the hand of the British state. Thus, while white officials at the time put themselves at the center of the Creole’s story of slavery and freedom, Kerr-Ritchie explains that their actions were always in response to people of color on the ground, on the waves, and on the ship itself. This is one of Rebellious Passage’s key contributions; the British state did not free the slaves of the Creole. Rather, [End Page 259] the self-emancipated allowed the British state, itself compelled by its black subjects, to protect the liberty they already held. Rebellious Passage, then, is self-consciously history from the “bottom upward” (xxv). The final four chapters move away from the Bahamas and are largely situated in diplomatic parlors and Louisiana courtrooms...

This interview was conducted on August 13, 2004, at the home of Rafael Aguilera Hernandez in Tlactalpan. ROWELL: Were you born here in Tlacotalpan? HERNANDEZ: No. I was born in a more popular neighborhood. My parents are country people with a bit of education. I was able to rent this house in the middle of town from my hard-working parents. ROWELL: Are you Afromestizo? HERNANDEZ: You don't realize that you are Afromestizo; you are born with it. I have heard that there were groups of black people here long ago. I believe that Africans came when the Spanish came. The slaves they had when they arrived in Veracruz were dispersed. I do not have too much information about that history, but it is known that they were African. Now, there are some people with stronger characteristics and some with less. ROWELL: In Tlacotalpan, what does it mean to be of African descent? What does it mean to descend from the African slaves who were brought here in the colonial times? HERNANDEZ: In reality, the idea is new. I myself had not heard the term "Afromestizo" but once or twice, and I had never really paid attention to it. It is as if there is no concept that one is Afromestizo. You are born Mexican. You do not search for your roots, for that mixture of Spanish, African, or indigenous blood. Here everyone is mixed. ROWELL: Do any of the people here know that they are descendents of Africans? HERNANDEZ: I think that some do. ROWELL: Do people—in this village, in this pueblo, this town, or in other places—know that slavery existed long ago in Mexico? [End Page 475] HERNANDEZ: They do know, but they do not inform you. You have an idea, you grow up, and they finally tell you that there were slaves, people from other countries, but you do not relate them to yourself. For example, I am Mexican, and I only believe in being Mexican. I do not stop to think about the mixture of blood, although there were African slaves. Slowly you recognize more; you realize that you do have African blood. ROWELL: Are Mexicans taught in school the history of slavery in Mexico? HERNANDEZ: Yes, but it is extremely brief. Extremely. Just that there were slaves. There is talk about crossbreeding but you do not relate it to yourself when you are a child. They do not teach you this when you are younger, and as a result you do not relate it to yourself or think you have mixed blood. In reality, as time goes by, you realize that there is African influence in the music, in your traits and characteristics, in your skin color—which is sometimes darker and sometimes lighter. ROWELL: Do the school children learn about the conquistadors, the Spanish conquerors? HERNANDEZ: Yes. They are taught in the schools about the conquests, the mixing and crossbreeding. There are more references to people of white skin and to the Spanish breeding with the indigenous Mexicans. There is no strong and clear mentioning of the mixture with the African slaves. ROWELL: So there is no discussion in schools about enslaved Africans that the Spanish brought to Mexico? HERNANDEZ: No. The Spanish arrived first, the people to which we yield honor. Then comes the discrimination against black skin, as if to say that slaves did not matter. I believe that in "the logic" of the actual world, it is obvious to say, "No, I do not have black blood," or, "Blood is not important." The presence of Africans in Mexico's history is an essence that has been transmitted through music, through our way of being, and through our magnificent skin. ROWELL: Why do you think that Mexicans of African descent don't see themselves as connected to Africa historically? Africans were brought here in the 1500s, even before Africans were taken to the United States—first in 1619, in Jamestown, Virginia. You mentioned Mexican racial mixtures earlier. We have the...