Memories of Madagascar and Slavery in the Black Atlantic

Wendy Wilson-Fall

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9780821445464
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

From the seventeenth century into the nineteenth, thousands of Madagascar's people were brought to American ports as slaves. In Memories of Madagascar and Slavery in the Black Atlantic, Wendy Wilson-Fall shows that the descendants of these Malagasy slaves in the United States maintained an ethnic identity in ways that those from the areas more commonly feeding the Atlantic slave trade did not. Generations later, hundreds, if not thousands, of African Americans maintain strong identities as Malagasy descendants, yet the histories of Malagasy slaves, sailors, and their descendants have been little explored.

Wilson-Fall examines how and why the stories that underlie this identity have been handed down through families—and what this says about broader issues of ethnicity and meaning-making for those whose family origins, if documented at all, have been willfully obscured by history.

By analyzing contemporary oral histories as well as historical records and examining the conflicts between the two, Wilson-Fall carefully probes the tensions between the official and the personal, the written and the lived. She suggests that historically, the black community has been a melting pot to which generations of immigrants—enslaved and free—have been socially assigned, often in spite of their wish to retain far more complex identities. Innovative in its methodology and poetic in its articulation, this book bridges history and ethnography to take studies of diaspora, ethnicity, and identity into new territory.

Index

Abdul Rahman, 148

abolition of slavery and slave trade, 129

Acts of Trade and Navigation (British), classification of slaves in, 29

Adams, John, 185n58

African Americans. See black people in America, as homogeneous unit; free blacks; free immigration; Malagasy in America; mixed white/black ancestry

African Muslims in the Americas, xii–xiii, 148, 168n8

age at capture, 19, 54

ajami, 163

Alabama, 101, 124, 125, 126, 136, 154

Alexander family, 125

Ali, Muhammad (Cassius Clay), 117

Ali ben Ali “Butcherknife” (Eddie Puckett), 137–38

Ali Salaha Mahomet (Jeremiah Mahomet), 138–39, 194nn27–28

Allen, Richard B., 126, 131, 178n39, 192n72

Amelia Island (Florida), 112

American Indians. See Native Americans and Native American ancestry

American Revolution, 85–87, 102, 185n58

Anabaptists, 102, 106

ancestors: family narratives as means of signifying presence of, 157–59; revering and communicating with, 63–64, 135–36; slaves as, 65–66, 152

andevo (nonbeing), 57

Angola, 48, 68, 72

Antalaotra, 140, 165

Antambahoaka, 25, 163

Antananarivo (Madagascar), 3, 149

Antanosy, 25, 163

Anteimoro, 25, 163

Antongil Bay (Madagascar), 29, 165

Antze, Paul, 155

Arabic language and script, 5, 25, 138, 163, 165, 168n8

Arabs, in Madagascar, 24–25

Argentina, Rio de la Plata in, 27, 172n1

Ashland (Virginia), 106, 122

Austin, Allan D., 171n35

Austin, J. L., 152

Bafil (runaway slave), 82

Baldridge, Adam, 30, 174n30

Baltimore (Maryland), 91, 100, 106, 138–40, 142, 161

Bambara, 9, 77

Baptists, 85, 102, 107, 123, 186n74

Barbados, 26, 27, 37, 38, 42, 167n5

Barker, John, 115

Bass, William, 50

Bates, Austin, 49

Baum, Robert M., 175n3

Baylor, John, 46, 47, 49, 54, 75–77, 79, 177n21, 179n47

Bayly, Thomas, 50

Beckinridge family, 96

Behar, Ruth, 151

Belsches family, 96

Benin, Bight of, 55

Berkeley family and plantations,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. A Particular Ancestral Place
• One. Madagascar
• Two. Shipmates
• Three. History and Narrative: Saltwater Slaves in Virginia
• Four. After the American Revolution: Undocumented Arrivals
• Five. Free, Undocumented Immigrants
• Six. The Problem of the Metanarrative
• Appendix. Jeremiah Mahammitt’s Malagasy Words
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index