This is the first edition of the correspondence of Philip Quaque, a prolific writer of African descent whose letters provide a unique perspective on the effects of the slave trade and its abolition in Africa. Born around 1740 at Cape Coast, in what is now Ghana, Quaque was brought to England by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. In 1765 he became the first African ordained as an Anglican priest. He returned to Africa and served for fifty years as the society's missionary and also as chaplain to the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa (CMTA) at Cape Coast Castle, the principal slave-trading site of the CMTA. Quaque sent more than fifty letters to London and North America reporting on his successes and failures, his relationships with European and African authorities, and his observations on the effects of the American and French revolutions on Africa. The regular references to his African mission in popular magazines made Quaque well known in the English-speaking world. Initially writing when the transatlantic slave trade went largely unquestioned, Quaque in his later letters traces the period of abolitionist fervor leading up to the ban in 1808. Although his employers supported and facilitated slavery, Quaque's letters reveal his evolving opposition to both slavery and the slave trade, particularly in his correspondence with early abolitionists. Quaque's life offers a fascinating perspective on transatlantic identity, missionary activity, precolonial European involvement in Africa, the early abolition movement, and Cape Coast society.

Punishing the Black Body examines the punitive and disciplinary technologies and ideologies embraced by ruling white elites in nineteenth-century Barbados and Jamaica. Among studies of the Caribbean on similar topics, this is the first to look at the meanings inscribed on the raced, gendered, and classed bodies on the receiving end of punishment. Dawn P. Harris uses theories of the body to detail the ways colonial states and their agents appropriated physicality to debase the black body, assert the inviolability of the white body, and demarcate the social boundaries between them. Noting marked demographic and geographic differences between Jamaica and Barbados, as well as any number of changes within the separate economic, political, and social trajectories of each island, Harris still finds that societal infractions by the subaltern populations of both islands brought on draconian forms of punishments aimed at maintaining the socio-racial hierarchy. Her investigation ranges across such topics as hair-cropping, the 1836 Emigration Act of Barbados and other punitive legislation, the state reprisals following the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica, the use of the whip and the treadmill in jails and houses of correction, and methods of surveillance, policing, and limiting free movement. By focusing on meanings ascribed to the disciplined and punished body, Harris reminds us that the transitions between slavery, apprenticeship, and post-emancipation were not just a series of abstract phenomena signaling shifts in the prevailing order of things. For a large part of these islands’ populations, these times of dramatic change were physically felt.

The Reverend John Marrant (1755–91) was North America’s first Black ordained minister and one of America’s earliest Black authors and preachers. In The Gospel of John Marrant, Alphonso F. Saville IV examines how Protestantism and West African indigenous religious practices deeply informed his life and ministry. Saville follows Marrant from his time evangelizing the Cherokee in Georgia to meeting with Black Freemasons in Boston to engaging with diasporic communities along the Eastern Seaboard and in England. Using the Black folk magic tradition of conjure as a lens for understanding Marrant’s religious imagination, Saville outlines the importance of Africana religious and cultural themes, symbols, and cosmologies in the biblical interpretation and ritual culture of early Black North American Christian communities. Marrant’s life and work, Saville contends, reveal the diverse religious cultures that contributed to the formation of African American Christianity and its evolution into a prominent institution during the colonial and early history of the United States. In so doing, he demonstrates the need to recenter both religion and Africa in the study of African American cultural and intellectual history.

From 1798 to 1801, during the Haitian Revolution, President John Adams and Toussaint Louverture forged diplomatic relations that empowered white Americans to embrace freedom and independence for people of color in Saint-Domingue. The United States supported the Dominguan revolutionaries with economic assistance and arms and munitions; the conflict was also the U.S. Navy's first military action on behalf of a foreign ally. This cross-cultural cooperation was of immense and strategic importance as it helped to bring forth a new nation: Haiti. Diplomacy in Black and White is the first book on the Adams-Louverture alliance. Historian and former diplomat Ronald Angelo Johnson details the aspirations of the Americans and Dominguans--two revolutionary peoples--and how they played significant roles in a hostile Atlantic world. Remarkably, leaders of both governments established multiracial relationships amid environments dominated by slavery and racial hierarchy. And though U.S.-Dominguan diplomacy did not end slavery in the United States, it altered Atlantic world discussions of slavery and race well into the twentieth century. Diplomacy in Black and White reflects the capacity of leaders from disparate backgrounds to negotiate political and societal constraints to make lives better for the groups they represent. Adams and Louverture brought their peoples to the threshold of a lasting transracial relationship. And their shared history reveals the impact of decisions made by powerful people at pivotal moments. But in the end, a permanent alliance failed to emerge, and instead, the two republics born of revolution took divergent paths.

Kofi Dᴐnkᴐ was a blacksmith and farmer, as well as an important healer, intellectual, spiritual leader, settler of disputes, and custodian of shared values for his Ghanaian community. In Our Own Way in This Part of the World Kwasi Konadu centers Dᴐnkᴐ's life story and experiences in a communography of Dᴐnkᴐ's community and nation from the late nineteenth century through the end of the twentieth, which were shaped by historical forces from colonial Ghana's cocoa boom to decolonization and political and religious parochialism. Although Dᴐnkᴐ touched the lives of thousands of citizens and patients, neither he nor they appear in national or international archives covering the region. Yet his memory persists in his intellectual and healing legacy, and the story of his community offers a non-national, decolonized example of social organization structured around spiritual forces that serves as a powerful reminder of the importance for scholars to take their cues from the lived experiences and ideas of the people they study.

A History of the African American Novel offers an in-depth overview of the development of the novel and its major genres. In the first part of this book, Valerie Babb examines the evolution of the novel from the 1850s to the present, showing how the concept of black identity has transformed along with the art form. The second part of this History explores the prominent genres of African American novels, such as neoslave narratives, detective fiction, and speculative fiction, and considers how each one reflects changing understandings of blackness. This book builds on other literary histories by including early black print culture, African American graphic novels, pulp fiction, and the history of adaptation of black novels to film. By placing novels in conversation with other documents - early black newspapers and magazines, film, and authorial correspondence - A History of the African American Novel brings many voices to the table to broaden interpretations of the novel's development.

There has been much academic debate over recent years on Europe defining itself over against the »Other.« This volume asks from the opposite perspective: What views did non-Europeans hold of »European Christianity«? In this way, the volume turns the agency of definition over to non-Europeans. Over the last centuries, the contacts between Europeans and non-Europeans have been diverse and complex. Non-Europeans encountered Europeans as colonialists, traders, missionaries and travellers. Most of those Europeans were Christians or were perceived as Christians. Therefore, in terms of religion Europe was often identified with Christianity. Europeans thus also conveyed a certain image of Christianity to non-European countries. At the same time, non-Europeans increasingly travelled to Europe and experienced a kind of Christianity that often did not conform to the picture they had formed earlier. Their descriptions of European Christianity ranged from sympathetic acceptance to harsh criticism. The contributions in this volume reveal the breadth of these opinions. They also show that there is no clear line of division between »insiders« and »outsiders«, but that Europeans could sometimes perceive themselves as being »outsiders« in their own culture while non-Europeans could adopt »insider« perspectives. Furthermore, from these encounters new religious and cultural expressions could emerge.