From Enslavement to Emancipation: Naming Practices in the Danish West Indies

AbstractIn most contexts, personal names function as identifiers and as a locus for identity. Therefore, names can be used to trace patterns of kinship, ancestry, and belonging. The social power of naming, however, and its capacity to shape the life course of the person named, becomes most evident when it has the opposite intent: to sever connections and injure. Naming in slave society was primarily practical, an essential first step in commodifying human beings so they could be removed from their roots and social networks, bought, sold, mortgaged, and adjudicated. Such practices have long been integral to processes of colonization and enslavement. This paper discusses the implications of naming practices in the context of slavery, focusing on the names given to enslaved Africans and their descendants through baptism in the Lutheran and Moravian churches in the Danish West Indies. Drawing on historiographical accounts and a detailed analysis of plantation and parish records from the island of St. Croix, we outline and contextualize these patterns and practices of naming. We examine the extent to which the adoption of European and Christian names can be read as an effort toward resistance and self-determination on the part of the enslaved. Our account is illuminated by details from the lives of three former slaves from the Danish West Indies.This paper is part of a project (CitiGen) which has received generous funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program, under grant agreement No. 649307

Liberty and moral ambivalence: Postsocialist transitions, refugee hosting, and bodily comportment in the Republic of Guinea

Guinean hosts viewed Liberian refugees with the same ambivalence and fascination that many held for their own children, who were embracing the consumerist ethos of Guinea's postsocialist 1990s. Loma‐speaking farmers’ categories for evaluating historical change and refugee comportment grew out of metaphors of embodied agency and morality. These categories challenge some aspects of both Guinean elites’ and contemporary anthropologists’ understandings of the meaning of post–Cold War social change. [subaltern historiography, embodiment, Guinea, West Africa, fast capitalism, postsocialism]Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/111138/1/amet12128.pd

Dr. Svend Holsoe, Part 1

Location: MontserradoRuntime: 1:04:45Hearing Type: Historical HearingsCategorized as pertaining to Diaspora, Hearings.The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Liberi

Dr. Svend Holsoe, Part 2

Location: MontserradoRuntime: 2:37:08Hearing Type: Historical HearingsCategorized as pertaining to Diaspora, Hearings.The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Liberi

African-American exploration in West Africa: four nineteenth-century diaries

n the 1860s, as America waged civil war, several thousand African Americans sought greater freedom by emigrating to the fledgling nation of Liberia. While some argued that the new black republic represented disposal rather than emancipation, a few intrepid men set out to explore their African home. African-American Exploration in West Africa collects the travel diaries of James L. Sims, George L. Seymour, and Benjamin J. K. Anderson, who explored the territory that is now Liberia and Guinea between 1858 and 1874. These remarkable diaries reveal the wealth and beauty of Africa in striking descriptions of its geography, people, flora, and fauna. The dangers of the journeys surface, too-Seymour was attacked and later died of his wounds, and his companion, Levin Ash, was captured and sold into slavery again. Challenging the notion that there were no black explorers in Africa, these diaries provide unique perspectives on 19th-century Liberian life and life in the interior of the continent before it was radically changed by European colonialism