Jubilee: The Emergence of African - American Culture FROM THE PUBLISHER
Jubilee provides a clear-eyed chronicle of slavery and its enormous effect on our nation's history and economy, tracing the origin and development of the slave trade and the realities of life for Africans - slaves, runaways, and freedmen alike - in pre-Civil War America. The book also illustrates how the conditions of the "peculiar institution" were transformed into a vibrant, distinctively African-American culture, a complex and fascinating process of social, cultural, political, and economic change that embraces everything from language and religion to family life and self-expression. This stunning lesson in human adaptability shows how men and women with no rights - and often not even a language in common - nevertheless formed strong communities, melded African beliefs with Christianity to create a new, comforting, and joyous religious tradition, and survived deliberately dehumanizing oppression without ever surrendering their individuality.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
This is that rare title that effortlessly spans audience and age-group divides while it popularizes serious and compelling scholarship, in this case challenging widely held conceptions about modern culture in the Americas. In clean, almost terse prose Dodson presents a welter of facts showing the extent to which the colonization of North and South American depended on slave labor. A page-long foreword from Wynton Marsalis recalls the New Orleans culture of his youth. Next, Dodson (who has been director of Harlem's Schomberg Center for Research and Black Culture at the New York Public Library since 1984), along with his stellar team of scholars and poets, zeroes in on the Americas of the 17th and 18th centuries, when there were far more Black Americans than white. More than 200 photos and illustrations from the Schomberg's collection of more than five million work terrifically, selected specifically to counteract endlessly repeated images of victimization and document Black economies. They keep the story moving quickly and forcefully, and show concretely how black resistance resulted in cultural adaptations that now form the basis of cultures in the Americas: African and African-American carvings; portraits of prominent business and cultural figures; close-ups of irons and other implements of torture; marriage and other documents; contemporary press and poetry-there is an impressive amount of documentation here, culminating in the end of the Civil War. Never before have the economic and cultural histories of slavery come together so concisely and accessibly. This is an explosive, necessary book. (Feb.) Forecast: With its all-star authors and Black History Month pub date, this book could hit bestseller lists, and will become a backlist mainstay, through school-based assignments at various levels. Look for glowing national reviews and extensive media coverage. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
Celebrating African American self-definition and self-determination amidst slavery, this series of nine stunningly illustrated essays represents an exhibition at the NYPL's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture organized as part of its 75th-anniversary celebration in 2000-01. The center director, historian Howard Dodson, offers an introduction and epilog to the three-part work, which uses graphic visual images and selected narratives to display and document the world slaves made for themselves throughout the Americas. The work focuses on the self-shaping of an African American identity and culture that started with the dominance of the African presence in the colonial Americas. The essays excerpted are from the writings of Gail Buckley, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Amiri Baraka, John Hope Franklin, and others. The cultural legacies displayed here make this exceptional work essential for any collection on the culture or history of the Americas.-Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.
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