Scholars and students of the Black Atlantic, as well as those interested in biography, will be richly rewarded by reading this volume. The essays are uniformly excellent; the introduction and conclusions are superb. In their opening remarks, the editors grapple with the fact that most popular biographies focus on famous individuals. Such a focus can reveal much about the worlds in which the well known lived and how they were able to achieve success, but this approach leaves out the many millions who were swept into the Atlantic world of slavery. Very few were famous. In fact, the experiences and actions of these lesser known individuals, until recently, could only be gleaned in the aggregate, captured in statistical data found in the “Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database” (www.slavevoyages.org). But the editors and the contributors to this volume argue convincingly that biographies of lesser known individuals are important, for they can “move readers’ emotions” by illustrating that ordinary persons not only suffered enslavement, but had full personalities that led them to make “the best of a bad situation”(2, 44). The difficulty of writing about these ordinary lives, however, is evident in all the chapters. Sources are scarce. In many instances, the authors are unable to write full biographies. Instead they provide sketches of various moments in a person’s life—what Jill Lepore, as quoted by Jon Sensbach in his essay in this volume titled “Writing Black Atlantic Women’s Biography,” calls “micro-history”: the account of a life that is important largely “in its exemplariness, in how that life serves as an allegory for broader issues affecting the culture as a whole” (95).
The book is divided into four sections. In part 1, entitled “Parameters,” Joseph Miller, Martin Klein, and Sheryl Kroen take decidedly different but complementary approaches to outlining the frameworks that one should keep in mind when examining the history of black people in the Atlantic world. Miller emphasizes the value of biographies because of their ability to illuminate the efforts of enslaved individuals to influence their own lives. They can no longer be seen simply as victims or members of some abstract categories. Klein emphasizes the rich biographical data that is available about Africans who were enslaved within Africa. Kroen’s essay moves the discussion into the twentieth century, by analyzing the origins of the study of Atlantic history. She argues that interest in an Atlantic history can be dated to post–World War II Europe and that this reconstructed notion of connections across the Atlantic consciously omitted any reference to those aspects of Western civilization that involved such histories of genocide, the slave trade, imperialism, and colonialism. She notes that this sanitized narrative continues to exist in Atlantic studies and that the study of the Black Atlantic through biography should be understood as a corrective to the continuing emphasis on an uncritical celebration of Atlantic civilization.
The next three sections, entitled “Mobility,” “Self-Fashioning,” and “Politics,” contain biographies or micro-histories that highlight the experiences and actions of the enslaved or their descendants as they sought to manage their lives. In the section on mobility, for example, Jon Sensbach, Cassandra Pybus, and João José Reis explore, respectively, the lives of Rebecca Protten (a once enslaved Dutch-speaking woman who lived in the eighteenth-century Danish West Indies colony of St. Thomas, where she worked as a Christian evangelist), Jane Thompson (who moved with some of her family after the American Revolution to Nova Scotia), and Manoel Joaquim Ricardo (who managed to prosper in nineteenth-century Brazil). Movement, whether physical or social, is the theme that links these excellent contributions, but also of note is the fact that the first two contributions (as well as the essay by Rebecca Scott and Jean-Michel Hébrard in the last section on politics) focus on the lives of enslaved women. Sources containing information about the lives of the enslaved are quite limited in general, but this is especially so with regard to women, a fact that makes these contributions especially welcome. All the authors discuss their various sources (court records, estate inventories, Royal Navy documents, probate and baptismal records, etc.) and the difficulties associated with trying to capture the lives of individuals from their own perspective rather than from the perspectives of observers.
These challenges are also evident in the section of the book titled “Self-Fashioning.” Here the theme of mobility is present as well, but much more emphasis is placed on understanding how individuals established their identity in specific environments. Lloyd Kramer examines the life of the American slave David Door and his drive to be seen as a respectable gentleman in Europe; Vincent Carretta provides an outstanding overview of the debates that have ensued as a result of his earlier discovery that Olaudah Equiano, who became quite famous in his own day, was likely born in South Carolina rather than in West Africa, as Equiano claimed in his autobiography. Lisa Lindsay explores the construction of self by James Churchwill Vaughn, a native of South Carolina, who claimed to be the descendant of an enslaved “country marked” Nigerian. Vaughn immigrated to Nigeria in 1855 to find and live among those who shared his ancestors’ “tribal marks,” a feature that Lindsey determines was probably a fiction created by Vaughn, but which ultimately resulted in the establishment of an extended family that stretched from Nigeria to the United States.
In the final section, entitled “Politics,” Scott and Hébrard trace the history of Rosalie, a Peul woman enslaved in Haiti whose later status as a freed woman was under constant threat as a result of bureaucratic difficulties, politics, and war. The authors follow her as she moves from Haiti to Cuba, while her descendants were forced to flee to New Orleans and ultimately to Europe in their own quest for freedom and respectability. Jane Landers examines the life of Franciso Menendez, who was enslaved in the area of the Gambia River and transported to Carolina, from which he escaped to Spanish Florida, where he was able to make a name for himself and ultimately gain freedom by serving in the Spanish military and learning how to navigate the Spanish colonial political landscape. Roquinaldo Ferreira traces the career of Francisco Ferreira Gomes, who was born into slavery in Brazil by his free slave-dealing father, redeemed by the latter, and later moved to Benguela in west-central Africa, where he became a renowned slave dealer himself, as a result in part of successfully navigating through the Portuguese military and civilian administrative system. In these last two essays one can clearly see the creativity involved in bringing to life the histories of otherwise obscure individuals for which there are limited sources. Both Landers and Ferreira are often able to provide many more details about the context that shaped the lives of their subjects than they are about the individuals themselves. These two articles illustrate perhaps most powerfully the difficulty and resourcefulness that are required in reconstructing a history of the Black Atlantic during the era of slavery and abolition. Despite these difficulties, the accomplishments of all of the authors are remarkable.
