In their new collection of biographies investigating the Black Atlantic world, Lisa A. Lindsay and John Wood Sweet join the growing call to take the enormous, sometimes amorphous, studies of Atlantic history in a more focused direction. Biography, as others have recently noted, offers scholars the chance to examine the lived experience of individuals and small groups in order to more fully understand the diversity of peoples and cultures of the Atlantic. Lindsay and Sweet correctly point out that many studies of the Atlantic have introduced Africans as ‘fodder’ in larger stories of cultural transformation, yet they were present at the beginning of the Atlantic world and ubiquitous in its physical, intellectual, and cultural construction (p. 2). The use of biography as their tool for inquiry allows the scholars who contributed to the volume to reveal the Atlantic, and more specifically, the Black Atlantic, as a deeply personal place where actual people navigated their own lives in the face of the larger imperial/cultural/social processes – the kind that most scholars focus on in their work. In short, this volume implores us to remember that people – above any theories, genres, or subfields – comprise the past.
The contributors to the volume are well-known to most scholars in the field of Atlantic history, with John Sensbach, James T. Campbell, Joseph Miller, Cassandra Pybus, and Jane Landers among them. The volume is organized in four parts. In Part One, ‘Parameters’, scholars address the well-worn question of what is Atlantic history, but they do so in unique ways. For example, the Sheryl Kroen chapter, ‘Robinson Charley: The Ideological Underpinnings of Atlantic History’ explores the familiar linkage of today's scholarship to Second Word War-era politics. Instead of arguing that NATO was the key organization to solidify the concept of a shared Atlantic history, Kroen examines a short film adaptation of Robinson Crusoe that was repackaged for use as propaganda during the Marshall Plan to fundamentally change the way Europeans and Americans thought of their shared civilizations going forward. In Part Two, ‘Mobility’, scholars illuminate the lives of their subjects against the dynamic backdrop of movement and migration. One example is João José Reis's work on Manoel Joaquim Ricardo, which offers a fascinating examination of a liberto who rose to be a large urban slave owner in Brazil in the early to middle nineteenth century. Part Three, ‘Self-Fashioning’, explores how persons of African descent navigated situational and relational identities. Vincent Carretta contributes a chapter in this section about the now familiar story of Olaudah Equiano's sourcing problems, approaching the topic from a literary perspective that better enables the reader to understand why Equiano took liberties with his story. Part Four, ‘Politics’, contains three contributions that explore black Atlantic lives in the context of political struggles and movements. Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard's chapter explores the life of Rosalie Vincent whose grandson became a prominent politician who advocated for black equality and women's rights in post-Civil War New Orleans. The authors explore how one family continuously documented their freedom in order to preserve it, but also to maintain the benefits of liberty. A remarkable piece of detective work, this chapter would prove very useful in any Senior Seminar or capstone course teaching historical methods.
Biography in the Black Atlantic is a tremendous volume that boldly rethinks the way scholars can and should engage the past. Indicative of this is the book's attempt to engage the problems inherent in writing most histories of Africans or African Americans: sources. Each contributor in this volume, in one way or another, confronted the challenge of sourcing issues. Are these sources valid? Can I find enough sources to thoroughly discuss my subject? How biased are the documents left behind? These are the problems historians, and especially historians of the Black Atlantic, deal with; what makes many of these contributions so powerful is not only how they deal with these issues but the way they embraced them to the point where new questions arise. As the editors relate, ‘how can the unusual individuals who ended up leaving substantial recuperable traces in the historical record be understood as anything other than simply exceptions?’ (p. 3).
Additionally, since they are extraordinary, does this mean their story is too unusual to stand for the larger masses? As a collective in this volume, the contributors advance our understanding of the Black Atlantic world by telling these exceptional stories. In many cases, as more of these stories emerge through biographical studies we have and will probably continue to find that these exceptions were far more normal than previous believed.
