Overview

Drawing on a vast wealth of evidence - folktales, oral histories, religious rituals, and music - this book explores the pervasive if often unacknowledged influence of African traditions on American life. The result is a bold reinterpretation of American history that disrupts conventional assumptions and turns racial stereotypes inside out. William D. Piersen begins by examining a series of African and African-American oral narratives that interpret the experience of slavery from a distinctly black perspective. Centered on issues of moral truth, these tales bear witness to the meaning and human cost of the slave trade as perceived by those who were its victims. Piersen then analyzes the ways in which enslaved Africans adapted their rich cultural heritage to the new circumstances they were forced to endure. He shows, for example, how they imaginatively - and often aggressively - devised forms of public satire to resist white authority. He traces the transfer of traditional African medical knowledge to the Americas and demonstrates that in antebellum America many black healers were more skilled than their white counterparts. He further shows how African customs helped shape the evolving contours of American culture - particularly in the South - from holiday celebrations, musical traditions, and architectural styles to modes of speech, habits of work, and ways of cooking. The black legacy to America even extended, ironically, to the Ku Klux Klan, whose founders imitated masking traditions handed down from West African secret societies. By reestablishing the forgotten cultural links between Africa and America, this study enriches our understanding of American history and is a powerfultestament to the legacy of African culture in American life.

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9780870238598

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Reviews

Piersen (History/Fisk University) looks at selected areas of American culture from a perspective that offers an occasional convincing surprise, as he focuses on African traditions and social mechanisms that reached the New World (including the Caribbean and Latin America) with the black slaves. The author has collected folktales and oral traditions from both sides of the Atlantic to explain how blacks came to be dominated by whites - material that, while it may not cast a new light on history, is interesting in itself and gives access into the rationalizing consciousness of the enslaved. Piersen takes a serious, not romantic, view of African royalty: While few African kings and princesses ruled over vast regions or great wealth, ideas of rank and social etiquette were highly developed, and the author suggests that class-conscious slaves were not - as is usually believed - upholding their masters' values but were transmitting African ideas about manner and caste. Satiric song lyrics and the subversive humor of black Americans have often been described as weapons of powerless people too beaten to use force, but Piersen shows that public humiliation and criticism - rather than violence or physical punishment - was a primary method of social control in African societies. He suggests that the original KKK regalia (predating white hoods and sheets) was inspired by the masking traditions of African secret societies. The African origins and influence on southern cooking, Carnival, and the use of herbal medicine seem much less hidden. If Piersen can't consistently provide jolts of new understanding, his compilation of materials remains readable and interesting throughout. (Kirkus Reviews)

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