African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic (The Early Modern Americas) - Softcover

Buch 17 von 24: The Early Modern Americas

Bennett, Herman L.

 
9780812224627: African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic (The Early Modern Americas)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0812224620 ISBN 13: 9780812224627
Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

A thought-provoking reappraisal of the first European encounters with Africa

As early as 1441, and well before other European countries encountered Africa, small Portuguese and Spanish trading vessels were plying the coast of West Africa, where they conducted business with African kingdoms that possessed significant territory and power. In the process, Iberians developed an understanding of Africa's political landscape in which they recognized specific sovereigns, plotted the extent and nature of their polities, and grouped subjects according to their ruler.

In African Kings and Black Slaves, Herman L. Bennett mines the historical archives of Europe and Africa to reinterpret the first century of sustained African-European interaction. These encounters were not simple economic transactions. Rather, according to Bennett, they involved clashing understandings of diplomacy, sovereignty, and politics. Bennett unearths the ways in which Africa's kings required Iberian traders to participate in elaborate diplomatic rituals, establish treaties, and negotiate trade practices with autonomous territories. And he shows how Iberians based their interpretations of African sovereignty on medieval European political precepts grounded in Roman civil and canon law. In the eyes of Iberians, the extent to which Africa's polities conformed to these norms played a significant role in determining who was, and who was not, a sovereign people—a judgment that shaped who could legitimately be enslaved.

Through an examination of early modern African-European encounters, African Kings and Black Slaves offers a reappraisal of the dominant depiction of these exchanges as being solely mediated through the slave trade and racial difference. By asking in what manner did Europeans and Africans configure sovereignty, polities, and subject status, Bennett offers a new depiction of the diasporic identities that had implications for slaves' experiences in the Americas.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Herman L. Bennett is Professor of History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is author of Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico and Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570-1640.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Prologue

Years ago, on entering the Arquivo Nacional do Torre do Tombo, Portugal's national archive, an exhibition on early modern exploration caught my eye. It was 1998, six years after Spain had commemorated the anniversary of Christopher Columbus's 1492 voyage. Not wanting to be outdone by Spanish nationalism, the Portuguese staged an equally impressive celebration of Bartolomeu Dias's rounding of Cabo da Boa Esperança (Cape of Good Hope) and Vasco da Gama's actual voyage to India, which were accompanied by a world expo and numerous international cultural festivals acknowledging Portugal's former place in the world. In addition to reprinting many fifteenth- and sixteenth-century chronicles testifying to Portugal's global footprint, the national archive curated various exhibitions to display the cultural patrimony.

Perusing the contents of the exhibition, I could not but notice the scrolls, papyri, and embellished and laminated texts that, alongside the esoteric scripts, announced far more than the Portuguese exploration of North and East Africa, West Central Africa, the Middle East, and South and East Asia. The Portuguese court received the inhabitants of those regions as notables who, on delivering their respective sovereign's correspondence, enjoyed the protected status of emissaries. In this enactment of "renaissance diplomacy," the Portuguese, the emissaries, and the authors of the various texts steeped their rhetorical protocol in ornate forms of address. They stood and spoke as equals, which the lords, emirs, negús, emperors, pashas, manicongos, and princes conveyed through the detailed invocation of their royal titles. Pressed for time, I pushed on and into the archive, but not before taking a long look at the letters crafted in Amharic that Ethiopia's ruler addressed to his Christian brother and peer, the Portuguese sovereign.



Little did I understand then that this correspondence, embellished with royal titles and diplomatic in scope, troubled the conventional representations shared by contemporary Africans and their global descendants regarding the early modern European encounter with the larger world. In the popular narrative defined by conquests, colonial imposition, possession, and dispossession, what role—if any—did royal titles play? If titles did not matter, why were all the parties involved constantly invoking them? In the eyes of the Europeans, what function did they serve? How might these titles reveal something different about a well-known past typified by the easy juxtapositions of conquerors and conquered, winners and victims, colonizers and colonized, masters and slaves? Stated differently, in the contemporary African and its related diasporic imaginary, but also among scholars of colonial slavery, the foundational premise resides in the abject and violated body of the enslaved, the object unmoored and alienated from all preexisting social ties. Dominance resulting in objectification, always already conceived as secular in form, did not engender an inquiry into a previous status. For this reason, the process of enslavement foreclosed an engagement with the past, thus constituting the slave as an epistemic object of the here, now, and future. Simply stated, a master was a master and a slave a slave.

But language matters, and as a historian of Africans, I was keen on knowing if the use of royal terminology in the texts before me was related to a grammar of politics that perhaps informed Europe's encounter with Africa and the subsequent histories that unfolded. The answer to this query resides in what follows. At its core, this book asks what role, if any, did the acknowledged existence of politics in Africa play in shaping early modern European expansion—to which a final related question has been appended: how might this political grammar be illustrative of pasts that have been lost under the subsequent weight of successive colonial impositions and our restricted political imagination?

The terminology used in the letters allowed me to conceive of the pervasiveness with which European chroniclers and travel writers used Iberian royal tropes to describe the earliest encounters with Africans. Royalty saturated the landscape. With this awareness, I re-immersed myself in the familiar travelogues and chronicles describing the European encounter with Africa. It was immediately clear that the terminology formed a corpus, a "register" if you will, questioning the idea of European apotheosis that, in turn, telescoped the emergence and dominance of a slave trade mediated by commodification in which tenuous relations were market driven. In pondering the ubiquitous use of royal terminology, I asked if one could read this phenomenon as an acknowledgment of African sovereignty that was simultaneously constitutive of early modern Iberian imperial statecraft. Incessantly focused on the Europeans' pervasive deployment of royal terminology in reference to African sovereigns, I intentionally relied on the narrative literature, composed of chronicles and travelogues, that has been foundational to framing the earliest encounter between Africans and Europeans. In the extant documents, I glimpsed traces of a past that tacked between African and European history, which begged for a reconsideration of the New World's origin story of blackness, the early modern African diaspora, and Atlantic history.

The interpretive practice of rereading the early modern colonial library for evidence, understandings, and events complicating the inaugural moments of European expansion also offered the possibility to enrich knowledge production as it relates to the formation of the African diaspora. Rereading the familiar engenders an origin story still in need of being conceived that—irrespective of the demands of our postcolonial present—has implications for how the subsequent past unfolds. Obviously, the narrative of slavery and freedom stood on the horizon, but a strategic rereading of the early modern colonial library also questions truths bequeathed to us from a subsequent liberal era that to this day still colonizes our imaginary when it comes to framing the fifteenth-century European encounter with Africa.

Stated less abstractly, the European encounter with Africa is generally not seen as a site of theorization with regard to the political. But the political informs every text of this encounter. At the level of generality, I am interested in rhetoric and performances of lordship alongside the legal regimes, ceremonies, and pomp constitutive of early modern politics both in the form of sovereign power and sovereignty. Scholars of the slave trade usually look at these "anecdotes"—at best curiosities that figure in cultural history—as exceptional instances that are quickly relegated in favor of serial data or abstraction. I am intent on reading the rhetoric, incidents, ceremonies, and rituals embedded in the chronicles and travel accounts as political tropes. These tropes and anecdotes, prominently manifest in the well-used tomes of the colonial library, engender an equally valid reading of the colonial past as it relates to Africa, Africans, and the formation of the African diaspora.



Let us turn from the texts on display in Portugal's national archive to one of the most iconic moments of the European encounter with Africans. In 1441, building on years of previous Portuguese trading, hunting, and fishing expeditions that scoured the Atlantic coastline south of Cape Bajador, a small fleet of caravels anchored at Lagos on the southern Portuguese coast. As the returning crew discharged their cargo in the presence of Infante Dom Henrique, popularly known as Henry the Navigator, the spectacle of the handful of "captives" drew the attention of the royal party. Though few in number, the captives sparked commentary but also expectations....

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
University of Pennsylvania Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2020
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812224620
ISBN 13 
9780812224627
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
226
Kontakt zum Hersteller
preigu GmbH & Co. KG
mail@preigu.de

Lengericher Landstr. 19
Osnabrück
Niedersachsen
49078
Deutschland

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9780812250633: African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic (Early Modern Americas)

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  081225063X ISBN 13:  9780812250633
Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018
Hardcover