New scholarship confirms African origins shaped New World slave resistance

Evidence

Thanks to the University of North Carolina Press, this tragedy should prove to be temporary. Not unlike the music of Thelonious Monk, Black Marxism remains as fresh and insightful as when it was first composed, still productively engaged with the central questions posed by histories of the African Diaspora. For example, the book attempts to address the important matter of how extensively Black people reproduced an “African” culture in the New World. This age-old question was first raised provocatively by scholars such as Melville Herskovits and Lorenzo Turner, but it has returned with a vengeance in the recent work of Michael Mullin, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Carolyn Fick, Margaret Washington, Michael Gomez, and Joao Reis. These newer studies, despite their emphasis on documenting and acknowledging African “ethnic” diversity, reinforce Robinson’s thesis that African resistance to New World slavery was profoundly shaped by the influence of slaves’ West and Central African roots. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 35

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the debate over African cultural continuity in the diaspora first raised by Herskovits, a foundational frame for the Black radical tradition question.