Ritual Rememory

My plan was to take us all to the other side where my own ma'am is.
They stopped me from getting us there, but they didn't stop

you from getting here. Beloved, Toni Morrison
"That way." Halle was pointing over the stable. "Where he took my ma'am. Sixo say freedom is that way. A whole train is going and
if we can get there, don't need to be no buyout."

ritual rememory
curated by amma birago
for toni morrisons sethe, beloved.
ritual reality and performance as freedom and escape
in black African communities in the New World:
on ritual in the concept of death and liminality;
the middle passage, pan-africanism and
ethnonationalism.

What one does not remember contains the key to ones tantrums and ones poise.
What one does not remember is he serpent in the garden of ones dreams. it has something
to do with the fact that no one wishes to be plunged, head down, into the torrent of
what he does not remember and does not wish to remember.
- James Baldwin. The Evidence of Things Not Seen

The travelers past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day
that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his
that he did not know he had; the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in
foreign, unpossessed places. - Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities.
My plan was to take us all to the other side where my own ma'am is. They stopped me from getting us there, but they didn't stop
That's how come I had to get all my children out. No matter what.
Where I was before I came here, that place is real. It's never going away. Even if the whole farm--every tree and
grass blade of it dies. The picture is still there and what's more, if you go there--you who never was there--if you go
there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there for you, waiting for you. So, Denver,
you can't never go there. Never. Because even though it's all over--over and done with-- it's going to always be there
waiting for you. That's how come I had to get all my children out. No matter what."
Denver picked at her fingernails. "If it's still there, waiting, that must mean that nothing ever dies."
Sethe looked right in Denver's face. "Nothing ever does," she said.

I'll explain to her, even though
I don't have to. Why I did it. How if I hadn't killed her she would have died
and that is something I could not bear to happen to her.

Bit by bit, along with the others,
she had claimed herself. Freeing yourself was one thing;
claiming ownership of that freed self was another.
Toni Morrison, on Sethe.

Oh freedom over me And before I'd be a slave
I'll be buried in my grave and go home to my Lord and be free.
Oh Freedom by Odetta, Sweet Freedom

Heard about the Ibos Landing? Thats the place where they bring the Ibos over in a slave ship
and when they get here, they aint like it and so they all start singing and they march right down in
the river to march back to Africa, but they aint able to get there. They gets drown.
- Floyd White, Georgia Writers Project interview,
Georgia Writers Project, Drums and Shadows.

Suicide, Slavery, and Memory in North America
Terri L. Snyder
Collective memory conferred upon them the power to fly - to escape slavery and to return home. Ex-slave memories
and folklore perform the cultural work of remaking the history of the self, the family, and the community within
slavery, ultimately transforming the crossroads of despair, suicide, and separation into an intersection of power,
transcendence, and reunion.
When they reached land, the Ebo chief began chanting,
"The Sea brought me and the Sea will bring me home." There was no questioning the chief's decisions. They all
began chanting together. Chained one to the other, they refused to walk into a life of slavery and instead turned and
followed their chief into the water. The site of their fatal immersion is named Ebos Landing.
Terri L. Snyder

The African Concept of Death.
In the religions of Africa, life does not end with death, but continues in another realm. The concepts of "life" and
"death" are not mutually exclusive concepts, and there are no clear dividing lines between them. Human existence is
a dynamic process involving the increase or decrease of "power" or "life force," of "living" and "dying," and there
are different levels of life and death. Death, although a dreaded event, is perceived as the beginning of a person's
deeper relationship with all of creation, the complementing of life and the beginning of the communication between
the visible and the invisible worlds.
Encyclopedia of Death and Dying, The African Concept of Death.


Mathieu Deflem, Ritual, Anti-Structure, and Religion:
A Discussion of Victor Turner's Processual Symbolic Analysis
The Liminal Phase in the Ritual Process
Following Van Gennep's passage model, Turner identified a three phased process of ritual: A ritual exemplifies the
transition of an individual from one state to another. Turner (1967:93-103; 1969a:94-96, 102-106) noted that
between the states the ritual subjects are often secluded from everyday life and have to spend some time in an
interstructural, liminal situation. During this phase, the ritual subjects are given new names to denote their "no
longer/not yet" status. The symbols exhibited express that the "liminal personae" are neither living nor dead, and
both living and dead; they express the ambiguity of the interstructural period.
This ambiguity is also demonstrated by the fact that the ritual subjects are during the seclusion period disguised or
hidden; they are considered neither male nor female, deprived of rank, status and property. They are all treated
equally and are subjected to the rest of the community. In sum, the liminal subjects are "neither here nor there; they
are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial" (Turner
1969a:95).
Anti-structure: liminality and communitas

I walked hastily forward and turned around, when, Oh, my God! what a sight was there! He still held the dripping
knife, with which he had cut his throat and while his life-blood oozed from the gaping wound and flowed over his
tattered garments to the deck, the same exultant smile beamed on his ghastly features! The history of the poor,
dejected creature was now revealed: he had escaped from his cruel task-master in Maryland; but in the midst of his
security and delightful enjoyment, he had been overtaken by the human blood-hound, and returned to his avaricious
and tyrannical master, now conducting him back to a life of Slavery, to which he rightly thought death was far
preferable. AUSTIN STEWARD, Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman, 1857

Performance Studies in Motion
Dwight Conquergood, Of Caravans and Carnivals
Life on the margins can be a source of creativity as well as constraint, what Michel de Certeau described as
"makeshift creativity" and a mobile art of "making do". Performance studies is a border discipline, an
interdiscipline, that cultivates the capacity to move between structures, to forge connections, to see together, to
speak with instead of simply speaking about or for others. Performance privileges threshold-crossing, shape-shifting,
and boundary-violating figures, such as shamans, tricksters, and jokers, who value the camivalesque over the
canonical, the transformative over the normative, the mobile over the monumental. Victor Turner, inspired by his
performance ethnography collaborations with Richard Schechner, coined the epigrammatic view of "performance as
making, not faking" (1982:93). His constructional theory foregrounded the culture-creating capacities of
performance and functioned as a challenge and counterproject to the "antitheatrical prejudice" that, since Plato, has
aligned performance with fakery and falsehood (Barish 1981). After his sustained work on social drama, cultural
performance, liminality, and, of course, definition of humankind as homo pe8ormans, it would be hard for anyone to
hold a "mere sham and show" view of performance. Turner shifted thinking about performance from mimesis to
poiesis.
Now, the current thinking about performance constitutes a shift from poiesis to kinesis. Turner's important work on
the productive capacities of performance set the stage for a more poststructuralist and political emphasis on
performance as kinesis, as movement, motion, fluidity, fluctuation, all those restless energies that transgress
boundaries and trouble closure.

Terri L. Snyder

Lots of slaves what was brung over from Africa could fly. There was a crowd of them working in that field. They
dont like it here and they think they go back to Africa. One by one they fly and all fly off and gone back to Africa.
Jack Tattnall, from oral history collected from former slaves, 1930s;
Drums and Shadows, 1940.

We Shall Be No More, by Richard Bell
Suicide and Self-Government in the Newly United States
A Review by John Wood Sweet
Bell ends with a discussion of the role of suicide in antislavery efforts from the revolutionary era to the Civil War. In
eighteenth-century antislavery propaganda, enslaved people driven to suicide were recurrent figures. They
dramatized the inhumanity of the slave trade and plantation slavery, and they cast enslaved Africans as people of
sensibility and honor. After a lull in large-scale antislavery activism in the early nineteenth century, the movement
that William Garrison helped rekindle in the 1830s turned away from an earlier emphasis on masculine honor,
heroism, and violent resistance. Desperate and distracted wives or mothers, torn from their children or otherwise
abused, now took center stage. While this brand of humanitarianism was powerful and widespread, a more radical,
revolutionary-era emphasis reemerged after 1840 as an important strain in the national antislavery debate,
championing the legitimacy of direct, violent, and even self-destructive, resistance: Liberty Or Death, Henry
Highland Garnet exhorted in 1843. Brethren, arise, arise! Strike for your lives and liberties. Now is the day and the
hour. Let every slave throughout the land do this, and the days of slavery are numbered.
This article widens the traditional scope of evidence to consider slave self-destruction from multiple perspectives
and chronological moments and more effectively places suicide within the long history of North American slavery.
Slave suicide often has been rightly perceived as a form of defiance; indeed, Michael Gomez assesses suicide as
perhaps the ultimate form of resistance.
the act of self-destruction and its various meanings within the context of slavery. Suicide by slaves might signal
cultural continuity with ethnic African attitudes about choosing death rather than dishonor, or it might be seen as an
entirely reasonable - if not outright revolutionary - response to enslavement. Suicide might have been a source of
spiritual relief for slaves: a means for African-born slaves to transmigrate to Africa or a way for native-born
Christian slaves to reach heaven. Suicide might also be understood as an aggressive act toward others, as an
expression of gendered entitlement, or as an escape from physical or emotional pain.
Using Saidiya V. Hartmans argument that memory is not simply an inventory of what went before, but is, rather, a
bridge from the past to the present that redresses the wrongs of history, the stories can also be seen as corrective
measures. In this sense, flying African folklore demonstrates the power of cultural memory to reshape past tragedies,
transforming stories of suicide into stories of strength and propelling them into the future.


Philip D. Morgan. The Cultural Implications of the Atlantic Slave Trade
African Regional Origins, American Destinations and New World Developments
He argues, among other things, that randomization was not a function of
the middle passage; rather, slave ships drew their entire cargo from only one or two
African ports, and their catchment areas were homogeneous.
In the early modern era, an increasingly integrated and cohesive Atlantic world began to emerge. The Atlantic was
the first ocean in the history of the world to be regularly crossed, and the lands that bordered it came to have a
common history. Over time, a variety of links, bonds and connections drew the territories around the Atlantic - that
vast 'inland sea' - more closely together. People, goods and ideas circulated in ever wider and deeper flows between
the pan-Atlantic continents. Changes in one corner of the Atlantic world had repercussions in others; even seemingly
local and provincial developments invariably had Atlantic dimensions. Diverse and heterogeneous, this Atlantic
world became one - a unitary whole, a single system.
Prior to 1820 two to three times as many Africans as Europeans crossed the Atlantic to the New World. Much of
the wealth of the Atlantic economy derived from slave-produced commodities in what was the world's first system
of multinational production for a mass market. Slavery defined the structure of many Atlantic societies,
underpinning not just their economies but their social, political, cultural and ideological systems.
At the heart of Atlantic slavery was the slave trade, a vast co-ordinated system for the forced migration of Africans
often from hundreds of miles in their homeland interiors to virtually every corner of the Americas. Both Europeans
and Africans participated in the trade, and four continents were deeply influenced by it.
John Thornton's lavishly praised Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World. Thornton describes his
work as an attempt to assess the 'migration of Africans to the Americas and to place this assessment in the growing
field of Atlantic history'. He argues, among other things, that randomization was not a function of the middle
passage; rather, slave ships drew their entire cargo from only one or two African ports, and their catchment areas
were homogeneous. Thus, 'an entire ship might be filled, not just with people possessing the same culture, but with
people who grew up together'. Once in the Americas, most slaves 'on any sizeable estate were probably from only a
few national groupings'. Therefore, Thornton continues, 'most slaves would have no shortage of people from their
own nation with whom to communicate'. In Thornton's view, particular African national groups tended to dominate
particular slave societies in the Americas; Africans in the New World often shared common languages and cultures
that helped them survive in a hostile setting. In most parts of the Americas, it is now contended, slaves perceived
themselves as part of communities that had distinct ethnic or national roots.4 Thornton's book ostensibly ends in
1680, but he and others are willing to argue that ethnicity or nationality was central to slave life beyond the
seventeenth century. In a general text designed by Thornton and others for the college student and informed reader,
the concept of nation as an ethnolinguistic entity serves as the key social force driving the development of slave life
well beyond 1680. One or two African nations in most New World settings, it is argued, dominated most slave
societies. Gwendolyn Hall credits transplanted Bambara as the central players in Afro-American culture in
Louisiana. 'The Louisiana experience,' she observes, 'calls into question the common assumption that African slaves
could not regroup themselves in language and social communities derived from the sending cultures.' Mervyn
Alleyne believes that 'one African ethnic group (the Twi) provided political and cultural leadership' among Jamaican
slaves; he also thinks that 'entire functioning languages' and 'entire religions', not just general cultural orientations or
religious beliefs, were carried to Jamaica.
Michael Mullin has argued that 'ethnicity', which he sees as a euphemism for tribalism, was particularly important
among Anglo-American slaves, especially in the West Indies. Thus, for Mullin, Coromantee was 'the most
conspicuous and important nationality in Anglo-America'. In short, an orthodoxy seems to have emerged that sees
slaves as forming identifiable communities based on their ethnic or national pasts.5
This essay will explore this emerging paradigm in two ways. First, it will examine evidence from the latest and most
comprehensive analyses of the Atlantic slave trade, especially in so far as these bear on the question of African
ethnicity and nationality. Second, it will explore three key issues raised by the slave trade material and Thornton's
(and others') arguments. Throughout, this study will aim for the widest angle of vision, the broadest transoceanic
framework, seeking to see the Atlantic as a single, complex unit of analysis, and trying to break out of the national
boundaries traditionally set for the study of slavery, whether African or American.
Most African regions funnelled a majority of their forced emigrants to one region in the Americas. Thus, three-
quarters of those leaving South-East Africa went to South-Central Brazil; two of three Africans from the Bight of
Biafra left for the British Caribbean; 60 per cent of the Bight of Benin's emigrants went to Bahia; a half of those
leaving Senegambia went to the French Caribbean; a half of West-Central Africa's emigrants went to South Brazil;
and a half of the Gold Coast's and Windward Coast's emigrants went to the British Caribbean. To be sure, all. the
regions of Africa sent slaves to almost all the regions of the Americas, but people tended to flow in one dominant
channel. In some cases, there was a subsidiary stream: thus a quarter of the Gold Coast's slaves went to Surinam and
the Guyanas; a quarter of the Windward Coast's slaves went to St. Domingue; and a fifth of West-Central Africa's
slaves went to the French Caribbean. Nevertheless, the regional African perspective on slave destinations reveals a
distinct geographic concentration, or in a few cases two concentrations, in where the slaves went.
Equally striking patterns emerge when the transatlantic links are examined from the more usual perspective of the
American regions of disembarkation.
Philip D. Morgan. The Cultural Implications of the Atlantic Slave Trade
African Regional Origins, American Destinations and New World Developments

Lorna McDaniel. Musical thoughts
On unresolved questions and recent findings in big drum research.
Nine West African groups, speaking various languages, were brought into slavery on Carriacou, forming a diaspora
on the island and in the consolidated dance with all nations dancing in one ritual. The Cromanti, consisting of mixed
Akan groups-Fanti, Asanti, and Akwapim - were the dominant leaders of dance and social law. They were named
after the Dutch-built Gold Coast slave castle, Kormantin, and they exited Africa from the site (Meredith [1812]
1967, 130). The Cromanti were, most likely, the group that established the Big Drum, as the first, largest, and most
influential of those enslaved on Carriacou (McDaniel 1998, 42). As other people were traded or sold to plantation
owners on Carriacou, the Igbo, Manding, Chamba, Temn6, Banda, Arada, Moko, and Kongo repertoires were
appended to the ritual, with their peoples forming a congress of multinational representation (Pearse 1978-79, 638).
The Big Drum is "an Africanesque ritual with many creole overlays in which the ancestors are supplicated or
thanked" (Hill 1973, 9).
In preparation for spirit visitation to the Big Drum, dance towels crossed on the spiritual space mark the entry
paths of the spirits, while rum libations thrown in the cardinal corners of the dance ring outline the paths of spirit
flight across the north/south and east/west axes. Only spirits may dance in the "free ring," a time allotted to them
alone at the opening of the dance.
Herskovits (1944, 491) introduces the role of drummers into the scheme of nation coding among Africans in the
"New World" from a culture not thought of as related, bringing a fresh insight to the complex nature of African
ritual organization.
Musical thoughts on unresolved questions and recent findings in big drum research
Lorna McDaniel

Kevin A. Yelvington, Diasporic Dimensions
The Anthropology of Afro-Latin America and the Caribbean
For Herskovits, even improvisation was an African trait, and "psychological resilience" he saw as a "deep-rooted
African tradition of adaptation"(H erskovits1 948; cf. Apter 1991). Herskovits's position was a logical extension of
Boasian historical and cultural particularism. He combined an advocacy of anthropology as a dispassionate scientific
mode of inquiry with a radical cultural relativism. His thought was also (in)formed by the patronage of American
folklorist Elsie Clews Parsons (1875-1941), whose work exemplified a similar quest for ultimate origins, as well as
by his relations with those pioneering Latin American and Caribbean anthropologists and ethnologists whose study
of the "African presence" in their societies predated Herskovits's interest. Their studies were congruent with his
approach, occurring within the context of diverse local nationalist projects (distinct from Herskovits's) that were
aimed at showing the black element in national culture and the black contribution to the nation, and that suggested
public policies relating to blackness.
Herskovits felt that the disparaging of "the Negro past" and cultural heritage on the part of the dominant society
sustained racism and the oppression of African Americans. In order to reverse this, he provided evidence for what he
saw as Africanisms in New World Negro culture that reached back beyond, and endured through, the ignominy of
slavery. These Africanisms were seen as survivals of African cultures that existed in more or less transmuted
variants in the Americas existing beneath the surface cultural forms blacks had adapted. He believed he could chart
the intensity of Africanisms, and specifically their origin in African "nations" or ethnicities (Herskovits1 933),
versus other cultural legacies in various institutions and practices across the societies of the Americas.

Foundations of Black America.
Stuckey's book is celebratory in tone, highly original but often unsatisfying in the use of evidence. The author writes
with feeling and with uncommon sensitivity to the cultural moorings of black people. His profound empathy with
his subjects leaps from every page. Writing from an unabashedly nationalist perspective, Stuckey seeks to
demonstrate that African ethnicity constituted the primary avenue for the forging of a black unity in antebellum
America. The principal question he poses and attempts to answer is that of how a single culture was formed out of
the interaction of African ethnic groups in North American slavery. Accordingly, Stuckey marshalls his arguments
to underscore "the centrality of the ancestral past to the African in America." To him, the ancestral past was revered
through the ubiquitous ring shout, "which was the most important African ritual in antebellum America" (p. viii).
This ritual, the author believes, "figured prominently in the formation of slave culture, whatever the demo-graphic
realities, from the earliest periods of slavery on the continent". Nationalist Theory and the
Foundations of Black America.
Colin A. Palmer Sterling Stuckey. Slave Culture: slavery, culture, and black nationalism
A review by Colin A. Palmer

Thresholds, liminality and fruitful chaos: revolutionary change in education?
Stephen Bigger
Liminality can perhaps be described as a fructile chaos, a fertile nothingness, a storehouse of possibilities a
striving after new forms and structure, a gestation process, a fetation (sic!) of modes appropriate to and anticipating
postliminal experience (Turner, cited by Ian Maxwell in St. John, 2008: 59-60).
Disorder and chaos can be fruitful in that new ideas and forms can emerge from it. We should value the potential. To
Turner, communitas ensures that the welfare of individuals takes precedence over structure, status and authority.
Where structure/authority is a straitjacket, ordinary people do not have a voice and are not free to be involved.
Social performances and carnival in contrast encourages free heart-felt participation, entertaining yet serious.
Crossing the threshold between childhood and adulthood in his African fieldwork inspired the anthropologist Victor
Turner to unpack the significance of the betwixt and between state he termed liminal, applying both to the
individual and to the community. Convinced that social ritual had a crucial role of changing attitudes, he applied this
to western society by emphasising processes of social change, particularly where they involved ceremony,
performance and carnival. He viewed this process as healing social rifts and psychic disharmony, whether expressed
in religious or secular language. Extending this, he argued for the importance of social drama/performance generally
as an aspect of social change, which he argued can have a therapeutic role to people and communities. For this
community action he coined the term communitas within a general process of anti-structure (that is, pressure to
change structure).
the millenarian expectation, the flow of cultural revitalization he ascribed to the ritual process itself. Communitas
has, for Turner, an apocalyptic agency; it "breaks in through the interstices of structure, in liminality; at the edges of
structure, in marginality." Ritual liminars, or "edgemen," as Turner calls them in The Ritual Process, possess the
radical potential of cultural critique, indeed of deconstruction." "The essence of liminality," Turner explained in the
late 1970s, "is to be found in the release from normal constraints"; liminars have the power to "reveal the freedom,
the indeterminacy underlying all culturally constructed worlds, the free play of mankind's cognitive and imaginative
capacities."
Stephen Bigger

The diaspora experience is defined "not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and
diversity; by a conception of 'identity' which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity. Diaspora
identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and
difference ..." (Hall 1990, p. 235). The lack of politics in the notion of hybridity is never discussed. "Africa," Hall
maintains, is never unmediated, unchanged, nor completely recoverable for Caribbean people and by extension
blacks in the diaspora. It becomes a sort of base for this hybridity, giving it a singular, recognizable form: "Africa,
the signified which could not be represented directly in slavery, remained and remains the unspoken, unspeakable
'presence' in Caribbean culture. It is 'hiding' behind every verbal inflection, every narrative twist of Caribbean
cultural life. It is the secret code with which every Western text was 're-read.' It is the ground-bass of every rhythm
and bodily movement. This was-is-the 'Africa' that 'is alive and well in the diaspora"' (1990, p. 230).

Ritual has an enduring life because it demands a time outside of time, where ones focus, often a collective focus, is
magnified. It is an opportunity to qualify some of the ineffable qualities of human existence in more material,
observable and practicable ways. And in this sense, it is hard to imagine humanity without ritual.
Commentary by Cymene Howe

From Limen to Border: DONALD WEBER
Meditation on the Legacy of Victor Turner for American Cultural Studies
Thresholds, liminality and fruitful chaos
What, I want to ask, is the difference between a "liminar," a liminal figure straddling "betwixt and between" (in
Turner's famous phrase) structural positions, in passage between identities, and the imagination of the "border" as a
zone or sphere of positionality? How, that is, does the discourse of the border challenge Turner's model of
liminality?
what Turner terms a striving after new forms and structures, a gestation process, a fetation of modes appropriate
to postliminal existence. The isolation, or perhaps invisibility, engenders a degree of spontaneity as detachment
from the constricted mores of the quotidian occasions a dissipation of social responsibility. Turner further
extends his definition of the experience and condition of liminality to encompass a typical permanent liminal state.
Liminality, then, does not necessarily assume a transitional aspect but can perforce exist as a state in itself. He
concludes that there exist individuals, groups, or social categories for which the liminal moment turns into a
permanent condition.

ritual rememory
ethnonationalism.

David Northrup. Igbo and Myth Igbo:
Culture and Ethnicity in the Atlantic World, 1600-1850
Ethnogenesis happens under specific historical conditions, either from a process of subdivision among already
existing groups, or by expanding a zone of contact (a system) that brings formerly discrete peoples into contact for
the first time. On a broad scale, this is precisely what the transatlantic slave-trade did, bringing previously discrete
peoples into contact and creating cultural opportunities, albeit under great duress, throughout the Atlantic world,
which persisted for a longer or shorter time depending on local circumstances.
Enslaved Africans, because they tended to be funnelled from broad regions through a limited number of entrepts
and thus were thrown together with others culturally not unlike themselves, expanded the boundaries of ethnicity by
restricting the indices of difference in the diaspora.

Anthropologist Igor Koyptoff argues that 'certain pan-African cultural principles' were the product of long
historical processes during which 'the effects of common origins, diffusion, similarities through convergence, and a
functional relationship among cultural features [have] been equally powerful in the historical shaping of African
societies'.2 The region's rapid expansion of overseas and internal trade after 1500 and especially after 1750 further
increased cultural interaction and exchange. The bottom line is that people from the region who were forcibly
transported to the Americas brought with them many similar cultural practices, some common languages, a tradition
of group identity that was fluid not static, but did not possess the ethnolinguistic 'tribal' identities of today.
Ethnicity in the Diaspora: The Slave-Trade
and the Creation of African Nations in the Americas.
Douglas B. Chambers
There is abundant evidence that, throughout the Atlantic world in the era of the slave-trade, many enslaved people
identified themselves, or were so identified by others, as members of African-derived named groups. Much of this
evidence is ascriptive, and was used by Europeans to identify individual slaves in terms of types of Africans. The
enslaved people themselves, however, could be active agents in defining the names of these nations, as Christian
Oldendorp found in the Lesser Antilles c.1770.

Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery:
A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
Review by: Sylvia M. Jacobs Source
Stephanie E. Smallwood in Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora traces the
forced migration of some 300,000 African captives who left the Gold Coast (today Ghana) in the fifty year period
from 1675 to 1725 aboard the slave ships bound for the English American colonies, and who later helped to form the
African diaspora in the Americas. Although these migrants did not represent the largest number of Africans exported
from West Africa during this half century, Smallwood contends that they still give an accurate characterization of
the circumstances that dictated the lives of African captives.
Captives of war who previously were assimilated into the African societies were now sent into the waterside
markets, separated from the life and people who defined them as individuals and delivered into "the perpetual
purgatory of kinlessness."
On the slave ships, despite the diversity in the social, ethnic, and linguistic backgrounds, they all experienced the
singular event of psychic terror. It was on these ships that the commodification of African captives reached its nadir.
These two groups often looked down on recently arrived African captives whom they referred to as "newcomers" or
"saltwater Negroes." The history of slavery in the Americas began in Africa, included the rhythm of the slave ships
in the saltwater of the Atlantic, and ended with the arrival of these human cargoes in the Americas. Saltwater
Slavery is organized along a linear trajectory where captives from Africa became commodities in the Americas. The
chapters in Saltwater Slavery describe the Atlantic market in human beings on the Gold Coast, the conversion of
African captives into Atlantic commodities, the political economy of the slave ship, the anomalous intimacies and
the "living dead" aboard the slave ship at sea, and the transformation of Atlantic commodities into American slaves.
The slave traders, in documenting their activities as buyers and sellers in the transatlantic slave trade, unwittingly
revealed something about the horrific and unbearable conditions for African captives, particularly their odyssey
aboard the slave ships. Smallwood attempts to penetrate the darkness of the holds of these ships to explore what
these tortured and tormented people might have been thinking and feeling during their voyage across the Atlantic
Ocean. The British Board of Trade in London required that agents in each of its American colonies report the ports
in Africa where captives were purchased, the names of ships and their captains that arrived in the colonial
settlements, the date the ship reached its destination in the Americas, the number of captives delivered to the colony,
and on whose behalf the enslaved workers were sold. The Board of Trade needed this quantitative data in order "to
monitor overseas commerce and ensure that its wheels turned efficiently in the service of the English nation."

'My own nation': Igbo Exiles in the Diaspora
Douglas B. Chambers
an earlier era to see the historical creation of 'nations', Igbo included, as an integral part of the process of
enslavement and entry into the diaspora.
It is the contention of this paper that the ethnicity of Africans thrown by force or by force of circumstance into the
diaspora affected (and effected) the historical development of regional slave cultures in the Americas. The ancestral
traditions they brought with them across the Atlantic continued to inform their 'secret lives' in the early slave
communities. Assuming that the experience of the Atlantic crossing and adjustment to slavery, painful and traumatic
as it undoubtedly was, did not obliterate the identities, memory, beliefs and customs of the Africans forced into the
diaspora, it is important to examine how those who survived the crossing drew on ethnic-African material, social
and ideological resources to adapt to slavery in their new worlds.
As Monica Schuler has noted for the Caribbean, the natural response to this uprooting of people was for them to
associate with others of their own specific ethnicity or nation, that is, for people to 're-group' in order to confront the
challenges of being slaves. It now appears that the transatlantic slave trade was not so random and randomizing as
was once thought.72 As John Thornton has shown for the seventeenth century and this author has suggested
elsewhere for later periods," the organization of Atlantic slave trading perhaps tended to concentrate rather than
disperse African ethnic groups. The vast outpouring of literature in the last twenty years on the numbers, origins and
destinations of Africans shipped to the Americas promises to provide powerful new tools to identify and describe the
historical significance of particular African ethnicities in the various regional cultures of slaves in the Americas.74
Moreover, one could argue that, in certain respects, these African ethnicities or 'nations' were a product of the trade
in slaves.
in the second quarter of the eighteenth century Igbo forced migrants were 'first-comers'. In such cases, they set
the basic patterns of material, social and ideological culture of enslaved communities to which succeeding waves of
saltwater (for example, Western Bantu and Mande) and Creole (or tidewater) slaves acculturated. In other colonies
such as post-1750 Jamaica Igbo were 'second-comers' who 'Igboized' existing institutions and cultural patterns as
people drew on ancestral material, social and ideological resources in order to adapt both to slavery and to the
culture of slaves already there. In both cases, Igbo made use of what they had at hand to fashion what they needed in
order to sustain themselves, to forge connections amongst and between each other, and to make sense of their new
worlds. This African derived process of bricolage was one of mixing and matching, of adapting and adopting a
combination of new and old ways of doing and of being, and often resulted in Igboesque regional 'common
traditions'
Before being thrown into the slave trade, he wrote, such people knew 'only the names of their respective districts or
countries'. Like Olaudah Equiano, once taken from their homeland, they came to see each other as fellow 'natives of
Eboe' and members of 'my own nation'.
The Igbo diaspora originated in the Nigerian hinterland of the Calabar coast and was immense, amounting to
perhaps some 1.4 million people in the era of the Atlantic slave trade. About half, or some 750,000, of those forcibly
shipped to the Americas, left in the period from 1750 to 1807. Although fiercely localistic in their home areas,
Igbo-speaking peoples, once thrown into the diaspora, embraced a collective identity derived from being a member
of 'my own nation'.
The Igbo peoples were a distinct ethno-historical group who shared a distinctive set of ancestral traditions and drew
on the same or very similar material, social and ideological resources in order to adapt to the situations in which they
commonly found themselves as slaves.
'My own nation': Igbo Exiles in the Diaspora
Douglas B. Chambers

poiesis.

'Here', wrote Equiano, 'each different nation of Africa meet and dance
after the manner of their own country. They still retain most of their native customs;
in the same manner as in Africa.'

When Olaudah Equiano (c. 1745-97) was taken on board the slave ship that carried him out of the Bight of Biafra he
feared for his life. Everything he saw that day seemed to confirm these initial fears that the whites (whom he
suspected were evil spirits) had acquired him in order to eat him or perhaps to sacrifice him to their gods. Equiano
also saw, however, other people 'of my own nation' on board which, as he later remembered, 'in a small degree gave
ease to my mind'. These people, whom he recognized as fellow 'natives of Eboe', or 'Eboan Africans', or simply 'my
countrymen', told the young boy what little they knew:
At the end of his Atlantic crossing, at Barbados in 1756, the whites brought some 'old slaves from the land to
pacify us'; these 'old slaves' had presumably not forgotten their natal language. Equiano wrote: "They told us we
were not to be eaten, but to work, and were soon to go on land, where we should see many of our country people.
This report eased us much. And sure enough, soon after we landed, there came to us Africans of all languages.'
Years later, in 1772, when he was a grown man, Equiano went to Kingston, Jamaica, where he was impressed by the
numerous Africans he saw there, and especially how those people grouped themselves by their particular ethnicities
during their free time. On Sundays, he noted, African slaves gathered in large numbers at a general meeting place
outside of town. 'Here', wrote Equiano, 'each different nation of Africa meet and dance after the manner of their own
country. They still retain most of their native customs; they bury their dead, and put victuals, pipes, and tobacco, and
other things, in the grave with the corpse, in the same manner as in Africa.'
In 1788 Captain Hugh Crow, who became a major trader at Bonny in 1791-1810, witnessed the public execution of
an Igbo man in Jamaica. He reported that the man's 'Eboe friends continued to cheer him with the hope that he
would return to his own country [after his death] until he was turned off the scaffold.'
Over twenty-five years later, Matthew Lewis, who kept a journal of his time in western Jamaica in 1815-17,
observed how his slaves grouped themselves according to their ethnicity; he noted, for example, that one day he
'went down to the negro-houses to hear the whole body of Eboes lodge a complaint against one of the book-keepers'.
Even recent arrivals such as Lewis quickly learned to identify individual slaves by their African ethnicities.
The Igbo peoples were a distinct ethno-historical group who shared a distinctive set of ancestral traditions and drew
on the same or very similar material, social and ideological resources in order to adapt to the situations in which they
commonly found themselves as slaves. They were a people whom modern scholars can study as a separate 'nation' in
the transatlantic diaspora. The Igbo diaspora originated in the Nigerian hinterland of the Calabar coast and was
immense, amounting to perhaps some 1.4 million people in the era of the Atlantic slave trade. About half, or some
750,000, of those forcibly shipped to the Americas, left in the period from 1750 to 1807. Although fiercely
localistic in their home areas, Igbo-speaking peoples, once thrown into the diaspora, embraced a collective identity
derived from being a member of 'my own nation'.
When S.W. Koelle solicited information around 1850 from Igbo-speakers who had been 'recaptured' and sent by the
British to Sierra Leone in the 1820s and 1830s, they told him that 'certain natives who have come from the Bight are
called 'Ibos'. Koelle went on to note, however, that, in 'speaking to some of them respecting this name, I learned that
they never had heard it till they came to Sierra Leone'. Before being thrown into the slave trade, he wrote, such
people knew 'only the names of their respective districts or countries'. Like Olaudah Equiano, once taken from their
homeland, they came to see each other as fellow 'natives of Eboe' and members of 'my own nation'.

When Olaudah Equiano published his memoirs in 1789, he included his Igbo name in the manuscript's title and
referred to himself as 'the African'. And when he summarized the first chapter of his life's story, as 'some account of
the manners and customs of my country', he specifically wanted his audience to know that, They had been implanted
in me with great care, and made an impression on my mind, which time could not erase, and which all the adversity
of fortune I have since experienced served to rivet and record...
Equiano's own personal diaspora transformed his identity from that of a member of a particular kindred in a local
village-group in 'Eboan Africa' to being one of many 'natives of Eboe'. His forced migration did not make him an
outcast, but an exile from his 'own nation'.
National Humanities Center Resource Toolbox
The Making of African American Identity: Vol. I, 1500-1865

I walked hastily forward and turned around, when, Oh, my God! what a sight was there! He still held the dripping
knife, with which he had cut his throat and while his life-blood oozed from the gaping wound and flowed over his

Brethren, our last word to you is to bid you be of good cheer, and not to despair of your deliverance. Do not abandon
yourselves, as have many thousands of American slaves, to the crime of suicide. Live! Live to escape from slavery!
Live to serve God! Live till He shall Himself call you into eternity! Be prayerful be brave be hopeful. Lift up
your heads, for your redemption draweth nigh.
LETTER TO THE AMERICAN SLAVES,
Cazenovia [NY] Fugitive Slave Law Convention, August 1850

In the United States today, suicide is less common among African Americans in general than in whites, writes Dr.
David Lester, a psychologist and specialist in suicide research, . . . [which] may represent an African worldview
which accepts suicide only as a very last resort in the face of extreme stress . . . Calculating an approximate suicide
rate among enslaved African Americans, Lester notes the difficulty of identifying unambiguous data on slaves
deaths, whether natural or at their own hand. Thus, analysis of the number, motivation, and consequences of slave
suicide must include anecdotal evidence, i.e., first-person accounts and second-hand reports to supplement
numerical data from census and plantation records.
David Lester, Center for the Study of Suicide, Suicidal Behavior in
African-American Slaves, Omega: Journal of Death and Dying. (1998)

One time dat I heard of a slave that had scaped and when dey tried to ketch him he jumped in de creek an drown
hisself. He was brought from over in Geogia. He hadnt been in Alabama long fore him an two more tried to
scape; two of em was caught an brought.
Martin Jackson, 1937

The negro woman [Lucy] confined in our jail as a runaway, put an end to her existence on the 28th [] by hanging
herself. Her master came to this place the day on which it occurred and going to the jail, was recognised by the
woman as her master. He had left the jail but a short time when it was discovered that the woman had destroyed
herself. We have never known an instance where so much firmness was exhibited by any person as was by this
negro. The place from which she suspended herself was not high enough to prevent her feet from touching the floor;
and it was only by drawing her legs up and remaining in that position that she succeeded in her determined purpose.
RUTHERFORD [NC] GAZETTE, n.d.; reprinted in Southern Gazette, 23 Sept. 1837;
reprinted in What Has the North to Do with Slavery? Colored American, 17 Feb. 1838

I recall to mind, right here, a terrible scene that I witnessed on a plantation belonging to Mr. Bris, who owned about
nine hundred slaves. At this time the slaves did not know how to run away; they would run to the woods, remain
there and then come back. One day three men ran away from the plantation and remained a number of months; when
they came back he ordered them to be tied up to the whipping post. He used the lash himself; he lashed them until he
no longer had strength to do it, then he ordered them taken down and sent to the next overseer, and ordered them to
be again whipped, and for the second time they were beaten, and after he had whipped them as long as could, they
were taken down and sent to another overseer. He refused to whip them and ordered them back again to their master,
but they tried to escape. The master chased them on horseback, one gave himself up, the other two still running, the
slave owner said he would have them, but sooner than be taken, they ran and jumped into a red hot furnace and put
an end to their lives.
LEWIS CHARLTON, Sketch of the Life of Mr. Lewis Charlton,
and Reminiscences of Slavery, ed. Edward Everett Brown, 1847

I walked hastily forward and turned around, when, Oh, my God! what a sight was there!
He still held the dripping knife, with which he had cut his throat and while his life-blood oozed from the gaping
wound and flowed over his tattered garments to the deck, the same exultant smile beamed on his ghastly features!
AUSTIN STEWARD, Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman, 1857
Desperation of A Fugitive Slave . . . . When we had passed a few miles out of Albany [New York], the boat hove
to, and there came on board four men one of the number a colored man. The white men repaired [went] to their
state-rooms, leaving the colored man on deck, after the boat had returned to the channel. He attracted my attention,
by his dejected appearance and apparent hopeless despair. He was, I judged, about forty years of age; his clothing
coarse and very ragged; and the most friendless, sorrowful looking being I ever saw. He spake to no one, but silently
paced the deck; his breast heaving with inaudible sighs; his brow contracted with a most terrible frown; his eyes
dreamily fastened on the floor, and he appeared to be considering some hopeless undertaking. I watched him
attentively, as I walked to and fro on the same deck, and could clearly discover that some fearful conflict was taking
place in his mind; but as I after-wards repassed him he looked up with a happy, patient smile, that lighted up his
whole countenance, which seemed to say plainly, I see a way of escape, and have decided on my course of action.
His whole appearance was changed; his heart that before had beat so wildly was quiet now as the broad bosom of
the Hudson, and he gazed after me with a look of calm deliberation, indicative of a settled, but desperate purpose. I
walked hastily forward and turned around, when, Oh, my God! what a sight was there! Holding still the dripping
knife, with which he had cut his throat! and while his life-blood oozed from the gaping wound and flowed over his

The following anecdote was related to us on lst Monday by a gentleman recently from Georgia, now in this city:
George, a slave, belonged to a family in the State of Georgia, near the Ochmulgee River whom he served faithfully.
He was an excellent machanic and during the life of his owners or claimants (for he never had an owner) they would
take no money for him, and in consequence of his faithfulness to them, at their death, George was willed a freeman!
Poor George then looked upon himself as one of the lords, even of the accursed soil of Georgia. But George was
doomed to disappointment. The unjust heirs broke the will, seized his person, and thrust him into the dark caverns of
slavery again! Bound for a new residence, they started down the Ochmulgee. George was on board the steamboat
bound for his destination, but the vicious robbers of his liberty knew not where. George looked sad, and talked but
little.
The steamer glided along, with a crowd of guests, unconscious of their weary fellow passenger. In the night a splash
was heard which awakened the attention of boatmen, passengers; all looked with anxiety, but seeing all appeared to
be safe, it was just a conclusion, that this must have been the noise occasioned by the falling in of the bank of the
river. Morning came, the grindstone of the boat was missed, information was given, and seach being made, George
was gone, they knew not where.
The river was ordered to be scoured by the eager master, thirsting after the blood of the mechanic. It was scoured
and George was found with the grindstone tied to his neck. Reposing in the depth of the Ochmulgee, preferring as a
man, Death before slavery! George had tasted liberty!!!
AN ENSLAVED MAN'S NOBLE SUICIDE, originally published in
the African American newspaper The Mystery, reprinted in The Liberator, 20 October 1843

Brethren, our last word to you is to bid you be of good cheer, and not to despair of your deliverance. Do not abandon
yourselves, as have many thousands of American slaves, to the crime of suicide. Live! Live to escape from slavery!
Live to serve God! Live till He shall Himself call you into eternity! Be prayerful be brave be hopeful. Lift up
your heads, for your redemption draweth nigh.
LETTER TO THE AMERICAN SLAVES, Cazenovia [NY] Fugitive Slave Law Convention, August 1850

Thresholds, liminality and fruitful chaos
The anthropologist Victor Turner characterises the experience of liminality as a stage for unique structures of
experience in milieus attached from mundane life and characterized by the presence of ambiguous ideas, monstrous
images, sacred symbols, ordeals, humiliations, anonymity. Physical estrangement and emotional dislocation are
inherent to the liminal experience, through which the individual is exposed to ambivalent social and physical
spheres, and thereby endowed with a potentially liberating sense of anonymity. The structural fecundity of the
liminal space, or the essential experience of liminality, is in its diversion from the indicative forms of the everyday.
As Turner later suggests: the liminal phase is the subjunctive mood of culture, the mood of maybe, might be, as if,
hypothesis, fantasy, conjecture, desire. The ritual, liminal experience, then, offers the possibility of change, but
does not promise. As I outline below, in McCanns texts the subjunctive liminality detailed by Turner is concretised
in the somatic experience of estrangement, of alienation and of emotional displacement. the liminal as somatic
immersion in the unfamiliar, or, in arenas of re-configuration and subversion. However, the ambiguity or fructile
chaos of the liminal context is not in any sense random. While the indicative operations of cause and effect are
eschewed in lieu of conditional modes, the subjunctive liminal remains a storehouse of possibilities, what Turner
terms a striving after new forms and structures, a gestation process, a fetation of modes appropriate to postliminal
existence. The isolation, or perhaps invisibility, engenders a degree of spontaneity as detachment from the
constricted mores of the quotidian occasions a dissipation of social responsibility. Turner further extends his
definition of the experience and condition of liminality to encompass a typical permanent liminal state. Liminality,
then, does not necessarily assume a transitional aspect but can perforce exist as a state in itself. He concludes that
there exist individuals, groups, or social categories for which the liminal moment turns into a permanent condition.

Ethnicity in the Diaspora: The Slave-Trade
and the Creation of African Nations in the Americas.
Douglas B. Chambers
There is abundant evidence that, throughout the Atlantic world in the era of the slave-trade, many enslaved people
identified themselves, or were so identified by others, as members of African-derived named groups. Much of this
evidence is ascriptive, and was used by Europeans to identify individual slaves in terms of types of Africans. The
enslaved people themselves, however, could be active agents in defining the names of these nations, as Christian
Oldendorp found in the Lesser Antilles c.1770.

Political fragmentation, and the consequent multitude of mini-ethnies, was mirrored in the great variety of
ethnonyms in Atlantic Africa. In the Americas, a superficial listing of all known group-names in any diasporic
region also yields a similarly bewildering variety. But this should be expected. What needs explaining is why, upon
closer examination, most Africans in any American region identified with a more limited set of diasporic
ethnonyms, and did so in a way that suggests they were ethnic groups. Although the evidence itself is limited, it
seems that the great majority of named Africans fell into a relatively few major groupings.

Underlying larger simplified identities 'created' during the twentieth century, historians recognize forces for
integration and differentiation that have been shaping and reshaping West African ethnic identities for many
centuries. The languages that are basic to modern West African 'tribal' identities have existed for thousands of years.
In places in West Africa, precolonial state formation was as important and as instrumental in shaping group
identities as in early modem Europe. The growth of Asante, Dahomey, and the new Yoruba kingdoms of the
nineteenth century instilled a degree of national identity in those who were incorporated into them. However, the
people north of the Bight of Biafra experienced no such political centralization in pre-colonial times, although
considerable economic and cultural exchange took place in pre-colonial times.
Anthropologist Igor Koyptoff argues that 'certain pan-African cultural principles' were the product of long historical
processes during which 'the effects of common origins, diffusion, similarities through convergence, and a functional
relationship among cultural features [have] been equally powerful in the historical shaping of African societies'.2
The region's rapid expansion of overseas and internal trade after 1500 and especially after 1750 further increased
cultural interaction and exchange. The bottom line is that people from the region who were forcibly transported to
the Americas brought with them many similar cultural practices, some common languages, a tradition of group
identity that was fluid not static, but did not possess the ethnolinguistic 'tribal' identities of today.
Scholarship about the formation of African-American identities during slavery has been moving in quite different
directions. Rejecting an older interpretation of enslavement in the Americas as having stripped Africans of their
cultural heritage, recent scholars have sought to demonstrate the persistence of historical African identities. Some
have moved beyond pinpointing particular cultural 'survivals' to positing the transportation to the Americas of
identifiable African cultures.


The following essay attempts to mark and account for what seems to me a key transition-perhaps "displacement" is a
better term-in recent cultural studies theorizing that has particular relevance for scholars in American studies. I refer
specifically to the slippage, or even the virtual disappearance, of the work of symbolic anthropologist Victor Turner
as a major methodological influence upon current American studies scholarship. In place of his models of rite of
passage and processual analysis we have come to recognize the explanatory power of what might be called a
"borderlands" position-a mode of understanding social and cultural processes and formations
historicize the "moment" of Victor Turner's influence-to explain why his mode of symbolic anthropology
achieved such methodological authority for American studies;
Eighteen years ago, the theoretical atmosphere of the 1977 American Studies Association Convention in Boston
was filled with the tropes and terminology drawn from the writings of Victor Turner, a maverick symbolic and
cultural anthropologist who had developed, through his experience among the Ndembu tribes of Central Africa, a
rich, evocative lexicon of compelling words and phrases ("social drama," "rite of passage," "liminality,"
"communitas," "anti-structure," among others).
Between the mid-1970s and 1983, the year he died at the age of 63, Turner emerged as perhaps the most important
(if not the most important, then at least the most readily invoked) cultural theorist for a host of disciplines; indeed,
his specialized vocabulary of processual analysis had found a receptive place in religious studies, performance
studies-the area/field that especially engaged him at the end of his career-literary theory, and, of course, American
studies.
the relation between Turner's notion of "limen" or ("threshold," as Turner often defined-it) and "liminality"-the
culturally dangerous but culturally creative middle stage of the rite of passage where all the action (so to speak)
during social transitions takes place-and the idea that has come to replace "liminal" in recent cultural theory, the
notion of the "border." What, I want to ask, is the difference between a "liminar," a liminal figure straddling
"betwixt and between" (in Turner's famous phrase) structural positions, in passage between identities, and the
imagination of the "border" as a zone or sphere of positionality? How, that is, does the discourse of the border
challenge Turner's model of liminality?
Instead, Turner fashioned a new symbolic anthropology by celebrating the unfolding, processual, dynamic
dimensions of cultural change: the shifting relations among liminality, communitas, and structure. How did Turner
arrive at, where did Turner "discover," these now famous terms? Turner himself provides a partial biographical
source: the family's own transition, in the early sixties, to America; their betwixt and between status in the fall of
1963, waiting passage to Cornell and a new life, highlighted the very theoretical issues Turner was grappling with in
his research. (The first public performance of his now classic "Betwixt and Between" essay was in March 1964,
after reading Van Gennep's Rites of Passage in a 1960 edition.) Indeed, what is remarkable upon re-reading Turner's
early work on ritual process, including the now famous essays collected in Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, is their
relation to the historical moment.
communitas (the ritual leveling process containing the potential for new social arrangements, new forms of
imagination, of ritualized play) a profound, creative adaptation of contemporary history, a deep drawing upon the
authority of experience-his experience, in America-to validate his vision of social strain and creative upheaval.8 To
be sure, Turner offered numerous case studies of social dramas in history to illustrate his theories
the millenarian expectation, the flow of cultural revitalization he ascribed to the ritual process itself.10
Communitas has, for Turner, an apocalyptic agency; it "breaks in through the interstices of structure, in liminality; at
the edges of structure, in marginality." Ritual liminars, or "edgemen," as Turner calls them in The Ritual Process,
possess the radical potential of cultural critique, indeed of deconstruction." "The essence of liminality," Turner
explained in the late 1970s, "is to be found in the release from normal constraints"; liminars have the power to
"reveal the freedom, the indeterminacy underlying all culturally constructed worlds, the free play of mankind's
cognitive and imaginative capacities."
Liminality is both more creative and more destructive than the structural norm. In either case it raises basic problems
for social structural man, invites him to speculation and criticism. But where it is socially positive it presents,
directly or by implication, a model of human society as a homogenous, unstructured communitas, whose boundaries
are ideally coterminous with those of the human species. I see liminality, in tribal societies ... as the provision of a
cultural means of generating variability, as well as of ensuring the continuity of proved values and norms." As well
as the betwixt-and-between state of liminality there is the state of outsiderhood, referring to the condition of being
either permanently and by ascription set outside the structural arrangements of any given system, or being
situationally or temporally set apart, or voluntarily setting oneself apart from the behavior of status-occupying, role-
playing members of that system. Such outsiders would include, in various cultures, shamans, diviners, mediums,
priests, those in monastic seclusion, hippies, hoboes, and gypsies. They should be distinguished from "marginals,"
who are simultaneously (by ascription, optation, self-definition, or achievement) of two or more groups whose social
definitions and cultural norms are distinct from, and often even opposed to, one another. These would include
migrant foreigners, second- generation Americans, persons of mixed ethnic origin, parvenus (upwardly mobile
marginals), migrants from country to city, and women in a changed, nontraditional role. What is interesting about
such marginals is that they often look to their group of origin, the so-called inferior group, for communitas, and to
the more prestigious group in which they mainly live and in which they aspire to higher status as their structural
reference group. Sometimes they become the radical critics of structure from the perspective of communitas,
sometimes they tend to deny the affectionally warmer and more egalitarian bond of communitas.... Marginals like
liminars are also betwixt and between, but unlike ritual liminars they have no cultural assurance of a final stable
resolution of their ambiguity."
Perhaps the first aspect of Turner's thought to note here is the implicit consensual dimension of Turner's vision of
cultural change through rite of passage. For all the emphasis on rupture and breach, Turner's social imagination is
compelled by the scene of re-incorporation, of re-aggregation as the telos of rite of passage. In this respect the
work of ritual symbols (as anthropological theorist Sherry Ortner has pointed out) is to "resolve social
contradictions" and (now I quote Turner) to forge "the process of regenerative renewal."' Emptied of, reduced from
what we now term his subject position, the liminar is shorn of his structured (i.e., political) status as he merges in the
flow of communitas, the aim of which Turner defines as the "continuity of proved values and norms." At some level,
Turner's model of social drama is transcendent, ultimately ahistorical and apolitical; it is unable to recognize the
contested, charged political valences embedded in the phrase "proved values," for Turner's vision of liminality
issuing in "homogenous" communitas followed by a regenerative return to structure is essentially utopian."9 Yet
perhaps the most problematic aspect of Turner's imagination of liminality and the cultural office of liminars is
embedded in the long passage from Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, for there Turner encounters a (bewildering?)
resistance to incorporation on the part of those "marginals" who somehow refuse to join the ritual consensus. These
figures-"migrant foreigners, second-generation Americans, persons of mixed ethnic origin" among them-somehow
find their communitas outside of the transcendent vision; they "tend to deny the affectionately warmer and more
egalitarian bond of communitas," Turner confesses, not realizing that he is privileging his sense of social leveling
and attendant cultural bonding over what we now recognize as an encounter with identity politics and the border.
Indeed, the passage marks a scene of "encounter" between Turner and those "marginal" (now read as "border")
figures who resist incorporation; Turner could not, it appears, "see" the border before his eyes. The radical criticism
that issues from these marginals in their resistance to the dominant culture ("structure" in Turner) adamantly refuses
the "stable resolution of their ambiguity" offered in the "affectually warmer" and "more egalitarian" space conjured
in the ritual process. (What does this mean? Do liminars of "mixed ethnic origin" bond with less emotion? Is their
choice of a more local cultural identity somehow less "authentic"? Will their identities remain "ambiguous" until
they accept tho harmonious resolutions of "true" communitas?) These questions sound from the other side of the
liminal threshold; they emerge from the politicized, postcolonial realm of the border-an embattled landscape where
Turner's "marginals" resist incorporation; indeed, a space where academic outsiders (who refuse to join the
professional consensus) now write ethnographies in opposition to classic norms of narration, newly empowered by
the subversive literary "flow" created by postmodern narrative itself. Rosaldo, as a committed border anthropologist,
has challenged Turner on a number of issues, most importantly (for my purposes) on how Turner "reduce[s]
complex human dramas to mere illustrations of supposedly explanatory structural principles";


In promoting an "Africa-centred" focus, Lovejoy (2000b, pp. 16, 17) argues that Mintz and Price's model results in a
"depersonalized" view of slaves, and he charges that their vision "telescopes" and represents a "hypostatization" of
the creolization process. Eltis (2000, p. 245), however, finds their idea that enslaved Africans on the middle passage
were a "crowd" rather than a cultural grouping to be "overdrawn" because of data that indicate the nonrandom
arrivals of Africans in the Americas. Both Lovejoy and Eltis misrepresent the Mintz & Price model in the process.
Anthropologistsa ccepting colonial data on slave ethnicities as unproblematicd o so by making unwarranteda
ssumptionsa bout the natureo f colonial knowledge (Scott 1999). The most illuminating studies on the Americas in
this genre are those dealing with specific times and contexts, such as Thorton's on African soldiers and ideologies in
the Haitian Revolution (1991, 1993). In contrast, historians of the Americas such as Berlin (1998), Morgan (1998),
and Palmie (1995a) tend to affirm the model by pointing, depending on the historical and regional context, to
material showing inter-African creolization, resident-forced immigrant creoliza-tion, re-Africanization,
recreolization, and the invention of tradition at work in the creation of ethnic/national labels and identities in the
Americas.
The diaspora experience is defined "not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and
diversity; by a conception of 'identity' which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity. Diaspora
identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and
difference ..." (Hall 1990, p. 235). The lack of politics in the notion of hybridity is never discussed. "Africa," Hall
maintains, is never unmediated, unchanged, nor completely recoverable for Caribbean people and by extension
blacks in the diaspora. It becomes a sort of base for this hybridity, giving it a singular, recognizable form: "Africa,
the signified which could not be represented directly in slavery, remained and remains the unspoken, unspeakable
'presence' in Caribbean culture. It is 'hiding' behind every verbal inflection, every narrative twist of Caribbean
cultural life. It is the secret code with which every Western text was 're-read.' It is the ground-bass of every rhythm
and bodily movement. This was-is-the 'Africa' that 'is alive and well in the diaspora"' (1990, p. 230). Gilroy, too,
opposes essentialism but tends to assume the formation of a black diaspora. The "Black Atlantic" is a singular, albeit
"hybrid," cultural form now "continually crisscrossed by the movements of black people" (1993, p. 16), typified by
their common "desire to transcend both the structures of the nation state and the constraints of ethnicity and national
paticularity"( 1993, p. 19). But his examples are drawn from Anglophone societies and with these specifics are made
to stand as "the" Black Atlantic.
These same authorsd evelop the concepts of "blackness" and "black culture" that are placed within the context of
power relations (Whitten & Torres 1998, p. 4). Blackness, understood as a kind of ethnicity ("race" and culture)
arising from cultural "identity politics" (Hale 1997), is for Rahier part of processes of creolization: "These processes
brought cultural fragments from various origins, as well as original creations, to mingle in particular ways, to be
reshaped within various time-space contexts, and to become singular cultural traditions associated with blackness"
(1999b, p. 290).
a central role for African agency: "Both African agency and African culture have been important in the making of
African diaspora culture, but, more surprisingly, the African diaspora has at times played a critical role in the
making of its own alleged African 'base line' as well" (1999a, p. 74). In the case at hand, he demonstrates the
reciprocal influences between northeastern Brazil and late-nineteenth century colonial Lagos, Nigeria. He
effectively argues that a mobile, educated class, transnational and culturally hybrid, moving back and forth across
the Atlantic, created and propagated "Yoriba" culture in Brazil that gets represented as "pure African" culturally and,
at times, racially. He argues that, in turn, this process is related to and derivative of the cultural-nationalist "Lagosian
renaissance" of the 1890s, itself the result not only of local colonial ethnic and class relations but of the influence of
Afro-Brazilian "returnees." Whether a dialogic approach is a "third way" or a kind of epistemic break is not yet clear
(Yelvington Forthcoming a), but it is compatible with creolization models of culture and language as well as with
Skinner's (1982) "dialectic" between diasporas and homelands.

ritual rememory
ethnonationalism.

Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery:
A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
Review by: Sylvia M. Jacobs
As these saltwater captives climbed over the sides of the ships that had brought them to this unfamiliar place, fear
and trepidation marked this new stage in their lives. Unable to reverse the course of their enslavement, saltwater
slavery made these migrants the accidental architects of an African diaspora.
On the slave ships, despite the diversity in the social, ethnic, and linguistic backgrounds, they all experienced the
singular event of psychic terror. It was on these ships that the commodification of African captives reached its nadir.
Stephanie E. Smallwood in Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora traces the
forced migration of some 300,000 African captives who left the Gold Coast (today Ghana) in the fifty year period
from 1675 to 1725 aboard the slave ships bound for the English American colonies, and who later helped to form the
African diaspora in the Americas. Although these migrants did not represent the largest number of Africans exported
from West Africa during this half century, Smallwood contends that they still give an accurate characterization of
the circumstances that dictated the lives of African captives. She presents the startlingly graphic and often tragic
story of merchants, sailors, and slaves caught up in the transatlantic slave trade and the Middle Passage. American-
born slaves were favored by slave owners, and even among the enslaved there were clear advantages to having been
born in the Americas. These two groups often looked down on recently arrived African captives whom they referred
to as "newcomers" or "saltwater Negroes." The history of slavery in the Americas began in Africa, included the
rhythm of the slave ships in the saltwater of the Atlantic, and ended with the arrival of these human cargoes in the
Americas. Saltwater Slavery is organized along a linear trajectory where captives from Africa became commodities
in the Americas. The chapters in Saltwater Slavery describe the Atlantic market in human beings on the Gold Coast,
the conversion of African captives into Atlantic commodities, the political economy of the slave ship, the anomalous
intimacies and the "living dead" aboard the slave ship at sea, and the transformation of Atlantic commodities into
American slaves. The slave traders, in documenting their activities as buyers and sellers in the transatlantic slave
trade, unwittingly revealed something about the horrific and unbearable conditions for African captives, particularly
their odyssey aboard the slave ships. Smallwood attempts to penetrate the darkness of the holds of these ships to
explore what these tortured and tormented people might have been thinking and feeling during their voyage across
the Atlantic Ocean. The British Board of Trade in London required that agents in each of its American colonies
report the ports in Africa where captives were purchased, the names of ships and their captains that arrived in the
colonial settlements, the date the ship reached its destination in the Americas, the number of captives delivered to
the colony, and on whose behalf the enslaved workers were sold. The Board of Trade needed this quantitative data
in order "to monitor overseas commerce and ensure that its wheels turned efficiently in the service of the English
nation." Through the systematic collection and evaluation of this information, the councils, boards, and other
administrative bodies with oversight over the nation's commerce could determine the exact amount of
"commodities" imported and exported.
In the first chapter Smallwood examines the development of the European trade in the Gold Coast. In the mid-15th
century the Portuguese established commercial relationships in the Gold Coast, which greatly expanded after
Portugal acquired Brazil, its only colony in the Americas. Spanish traders often sold slaves in the Gold Coast that
they had purchased elsewhere. In the 17th century the French, Dutch, and English traders joined the commercial
market in the Gold Coast, and in 1672, Charles II chartered the Royal African Company to oversee England's trade
in Africa. Gold was the most prized commodity from the Gold Coast in the Atlantic market until the 18th century
when the gold fields in the region reached the point of exhaustion and, at the same time, gold production in Brazil
began and made its way into the global market.
European expansion into new economic arenas in the Americas resulted in a huge expansion in the demand for slave
labor. Smallwood spends four chapters describing the experiences of African captives in the slave dungeons of the
"castles" and "forts" on the African coast and in the Middle Passage. Captives of war who previously were
assimilated into the African societies were now sent into the waterside markets, separated from the life and people
who defined them as individuals and delivered into "the perpetual purgatory of kinlessness." Smallwood details the
process of transforming "independent beings into human commodities" and concludes that "the methods by which
traders turned people into property that could move easily, smoothly through the channels of saltwater slavery took
the form of both physical and social violence." On the slave ships, despite the diversity in the social, ethnic, and
linguistic backgrounds, they all experienced the singular event of psychic terror. It was on these ships that the
commodification of African captives reached its nadir. In the last two chapters Smallwood describes the experiences
of captives from the Gold Coast upon their arrival in the English colonies in North America. She contends that after
several centuries of commercial exchange, captives who left the Gold Coast, unlike those from other areas in Africa,
had some idea of where they were going and understood that they were being taken to distant lands to work. In the
American slave markets, the commodification of African captives was realized in the sale of their bodies for profit.
As these saltwater captives climbed over the sides of the ships that had brought them to this unfamiliar place, fear
and trepidation marked this new stage in their lives. Unable to reverse the course of their enslavement, saltwater
slavery made these migrants the accidental architects of an African diaspora.
Smallwood's discussion of African societies in the Gold Coast in the late 17th and early 18th centuries is impressive
as is her meticulous dramatization of captives' maritime ordeals. To detail the day-to-day conduct of this deadly
business in human beings, Smallwood utilizes ledgers, bills of lading, voyage journals, letters, internal
correspondence between Royal African Company officials in London and agents in Africa and the Americas,
eyewitness accounts, and personal narratives. Agents of the Royal African Company produced a unique
documentary record of slave trading on the African and American coasts which has survived in relatively
comprehensive form. Saltwater Slavery is thoroughly researched, fully documented, provocatively argued, and
engagingly written. The book is a major contribution to the study of slavery and the slave trade as well as African
and African American history.

Herskovits . His thought was also (in)formed by the patronage of American folklorist Elsie Clews Parsons (1875-
1941), whose work exemplified a similar quest for ultimate origins, as well as by his relations with those pio-neering
Latin American and Caribbean anthropologists and ethnologists whose study of the "African presence" in their
societies predated Herskovits's interest. Their studies were congruent with his approach, occurring within the context
of diverse local nationalist projects (distinct from Herskovits's) that were aimed at showing the black element in
national culture and the black contribution to the nation, and that suggested public policies relating to blackness.

Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America.
Sterling Stuckey. Slave Culture: slavery, culture, and black nationalism
A review by Colin A. Palmer
African ethnicity constituted the primary avenue for the forging of a black unity in antebellum America.
The principal question he poses and attempts to answer is that of how a single culture was formed out of the
interaction of African ethnic groups in North American slavery. To him, the ancestral past was revered through
the ubiquitous ring shout, "which was the most important African ritual in antebellum America" (p. viii). This ritual,
the author believes, "figured prominently in the formation of slave culture, whatever the demo-graphic realities,
from the earliest periods of slavery on the continent" (p. viii).
Stuckey's book consists of a lengthy introductory chapter in which he at-tempts to identify the central organizing
principle of slave culture in North America. This chapter is followed by others devoted to insightful biographical
sketches of David Walker, Henry Highland Garnet, W. E. B. DuBois, and Paul Robeson. An interesting discussion
of the changing nomenclature employed by the peoples of African descent in North America is also included. Each
of these chapters could stand on its own. In fact, the remarkable introductory chapter presents the central arguments
of the work and it is this chapter more than any other that at once delights and provokes. Stuckey's book is celebra-
tory in tone, highly original but often unsatisfying in the use of evidence. The author writes with feeling and
with uncommon sensitivity to the cultural moorings of black people. His profound empathy with his subjects
leaps from every page. Writing from an unabashedly nationalist perspective, Stuckey seeks to demonstrate
that African ethnicity constituted the primary avenue for the forging of a black unity in antebellum America.
The principal question he poses and attempts to answer is that of how a single culture was formed out of the
interaction of African ethnic groups in North American slavery. Accordingly, Stuckey marshalls his arguments to
underscore "the centrality of the ancestral past to the African in America." To him, the ancestral past was revered
through the ubiquitous ring shout, "which was the most important African ritual in antebellum America" (p. viii).
This ritual, the author believes, "figured prominently in the formation of slave culture, whatever the demo-graphic
realities, from the earliest periods of slavery on the continent" (p. viii). Stuckey is also interested in the ways in
which slaves responded to the cultural challenges they confronted. He notes that the "nationalism of the slave
community was essentially African nationalism, consisting of values that bound slaves together and sustained them
under brutal conditions of oppression" (p. ix). Drawing upon a vast amount of documentation from several
disciplines, Stuckey argues that African cultural patterns dominated slave life in North America, and, by extension,
in the diaspora. He is struck by the ubiquity of the slaves' counterclockwise movement in a ring during a variety of
cere-monies. Tracing its origin back to Africa, Stuckey concludes that the use of the circle ritual was so consistent
that "one could argue that it was what gave form and meaning to religion and art" (p. 11). Accordingly, "the ring in
which Africans danced and sang in is the key to understanding the means by which they achieved oneness in
America" (p. 13). Stuckeys' elaboration of this argument constitutes the most original aspect of the work. To support
his contention that the bondsmen preserved and transmitted their "Africanity," he provides a refreshingly insightful
discussion of slave culture, religion, folktales, songs, and dance. Stuckey emphasizes (and perhaps exaggerates) the
secrecy that surrounded the slaves" cultural practices because "the possibility that whites might discover the guiding
principles of African culture kept blacks on guard and led them to an astonishing degree, to keep the essentials of
their culture from view" (p. 24).
The African-born person confronted a new cultural en-vironment in the Americas and made very creative
adaptations to it. Their Africanity, to use Stuckey's expressive phraseology, was constantly being modified, diluted,
and probably even transformed by the social and cultural milieu of the New World. Creole slaves were, to be sure,
socialized in the land of their birth and manifested a world view and embraced belief systems and a code of behavior
that were neither totally African nor European in their inspiration.
In any event, to support his contention Stuckey would need to provide a more detailed discussion of the religious
cosmology of slave society and trace the central tenets to an ethnically common and culturally homogenous African
past. But the African slaves, as is generally known, came from culturally variegated backgrounds and a variety of
ethnic groups, although in some instances they undoubtedly shared certain cultural assumptions. Stuckey's
discussion of the Africanity of the religious beliefs and practices of the slaves seems to paint a picture of African
cultural homogeneity as well as one of cultural stasis in slave society.
Stuckey's view that the various African ethnic groups forged a common unity, a "oneness" in America, is not
without considerable merit. His conclusion that the slaves' Africanity constituted the foundation of this unity should
not be dismissed. But the experience of a shared slave status, coupled with the process of creolization for New
World-born slaves should be recognized as factors that played crucial, if little understood, roles in stimulating and
shaping a collective consciousness of blacks in the diaspora. The very complex and dynamic interplay between
ethnicity, racism, shared legal status, among other variables, must be evaluated as powerful forces that fos-tered the
creation and evolution of a vibrant and enduring Afro-American consciousness. Similarly, one must question
Stuckey's conclusion that African cultural fea-tures were "not that much greater" in Cuba and elsewhere in the
diaspora than in North America. Specialists in comparative slavery and those familiar with the history of Cuba,
Brazil, and Haiti, to name just a few societies, will certainly contradict this view. These societies had a much more
sustained dependence on Africa for their supply of slaves than was the case in North America. Consequently, their
African cultural heritage was constantly being nourished and revitalized. In contrast, the majority of slaves in
nineteenth-century America, when the institution reached its peak, were born in the land of their enslavement. This
development, of course, had profound cultural ramifications for black America.
One may quibble with Stuckey over the degree to which the slaves' Africanity shaped their lives over time. But no
serious scholar can deny that important vestiges of an African heritage survived in the slave quarters and beyond.
And no one should doubt that a black racial consciousness that transcended ethnic divisions emerged. It is Stuckey's
analysis of the process by which this occurred and his emphasis on a seemingly static Africanity that provide much
room for disagreement. Stuckey's signal achievement is that he has forced us to reexamine the roots of slave culture
and the attendant political implications in new and exciting ways.


poiesis.

The Big Drum is "an Africanesque ritual with many creole overlays
in which the ancestors are supplicated or thanked" (Hill 1973, 9).
No longer unknown nor a British colony, current investigation of Carriacou and its ritual dance continues to define
the formation of slave societies and Caribbean religion. The Carriacou case reviewed here, although researched
from the living ritual, is in actuality a historical examination focused on ancient traditions. Commanding an
influence in molding these images of dance as a cultural/religious and universally symbolic pattern is Sterling
Stuckey, who reminds us that "dance was primarily devotional, like a prayer ... [and] was to the African a means of
establishing contact with the ancestors and with the gods" (Stuckey 1987, 25).
an island with unusual patterns of lineage drawn by people
with long memories of ethnic inheritance kept intact by a ritual dance, the Big Drum
In this article, I hope to use the spiritual contexts of the old society in formulating a pantheon of ancestors that has
been forgotten by the people but survives in the texts of the ancient Big Drum ritual. The perpetuation of dances,
structures, symbols, melodies, and texts allows a perusal of the discrete African ethnic origins and original
formations in the early society.
I continue to encounter validation of the cultural depth and power of the dance circle in its projection as institution
and canon in diasporan culture. The cultural infusion of the ring resonates as a history-keeping practice in original,
revitalized, and syncretized forms, danced in countless configurations, movements, and reasoning. The order of the
dance gives us a clue to ritual structure. Being aware of the distinctive low stance that unifies the first three dances
(Cromanti, Igbo, and Manding) and the upright stance of the remaining six will serve as a major clue to the
conclusions presented here.
ritual organization: "The Afro-Brazilian 'nations,' the groupings descended from various tribes of West Africa, have
different rhythms for the deities they hold in common, in addition to the rhythms they have for such deities as each
'nation' may worship by itself." From the Brazilian model of nation integration, one may speculate on a structure by
which the people of Carriacou may have developed a unified religion and discrete pantheon. In Brazil, gods are
named and called by drum rhythms; likewise, in Carriacou, these rhythms, perceived as lineage codes, may have
initially been the drum names of principal deities and not politically formed emblems as I had imagined them to be.
In the Carriacou case, the discrete though integral nature of the dance ring suggests a democratic social ideal that
honors national exclusivity and at the same time promotes prestige in social plurality. Blended beside a
multinational African congress, we see that the Big Drum was a consolidated diaspora for national cohesiveness,
spiritual outreach, and the retention of ancestral communication.
Carriacou, Grenada,
a society mysteriously unified in memorializing its past.
Carriacou is a simple, small island with about seven thousand people living on its arid soil and, some say, with the
majority of its population living in London and Brooklyn (Hill 2003). It is situated in the southern Caribbean, near
Grenada, its governing island, and near Trinidad and Tobago. The first major study of Carriacou was written by
Jamaican sociologist M. G. Smith, who revealed an island with unusual patterns of lineage drawn by people with
long memories of ethnic inheritance kept intact by a ritual dance, the Big Drum: Carriacou is an island almost
completely unknown to the outside world, and even to its neighbors in the northern Caribbean. Its political and
economic insignificance, coupled with its minute population and area, guarantee it a marginal position, even in the
British West Indies to which it belongs. In no sense therefore is it representative of Caribbean societies; yet a
knowledge of life in Carriacou is important for the light it sheds on the larger Creole units nearby. (Smith 1962, 1)
No longer unknown nor a British colony, current investigation of Carriacou and its ritual dance continues to define
the formation of slave societies and Caribbean religion. The Carriacou case reviewed here, although researched
from the living ritual, is in actuality a historical examination focused on ancient traditions. Commanding an
influence in molding these images of dance as a cultural/religious and universally symbolic pattern is Sterling
Stuckey, who reminds us that "dance was primarily devotional, like a prayer ... [and] was to the African a means of
establishing contact with the ancestors and with the gods" (Stuckey 1987, 25).
It is clear from the emphasis of the earliest Big Drum songs that their essence was seated in drawing spirits to the
dance for comfort, atonement, healing, and relief from insistent longing for the homeland. The literature reviews and
analyzes historical, descriptive writings on ancient ring practice at Congo Square of Louisiana, Pinkster Festivals of
New York, and Washington Square dances of Philadelphia (see Epstein 1977; Southern 1983; Stuckey 1985; Floyd
1995). The reviews of the dances differ only slightly from the description of the multiple and concurrent dance rings
in Jamaica in 1772, where "each different nation of Africa meets and dances after the manner of their own country"
(Equiano [1789] 1987, 128). And this was the essence of many early ring dances that convened in the fields in
several discrete groups, each occupied by a single nation, singing and dancing "after their own country," individual
and separate. Nine West African groups, speaking various languages, were brought into slavery on Carriacou,
forming a diaspora on the island and in the consolidated dance with all nations dancing in one ritual. The Cromanti,
consisting of mixed Akan groups-Fanti, Asanti, and Akwapim-were the dominant leaders of dance and social law.
They were named after the Dutch-built Gold Coast slave castle, Kormantin, and they exited Africa from the site
(Meredith [1812] 1967, 130). The Cromanti were, most likely, the group that established the Big Drum, as the first,
largest, and most influential of those enslaved on Carriacou (McDaniel 1998, 42). As other people were traded or
sold to plantation owners on Carriacou, the Igbo, Manding, Chamba, Temn6, Banda, Arada, Moko, and Kongo
repertoires were appended to the ritual, with their peoples forming a congress of multinational representation (Pearse
1978-79, 638). The Big Drum is "an Africanesque ritual with many creole overlays in which the ancestors are
supplicated or thanked" (Hill 1973, 9).
ritual organization: "The Afro-Brazilian 'nations,' the groupings descended from various tribes of West Africa, have
different rhythms for the deities they hold in common, in addition to the rhythms they have for such deities as each
'nation' may worship by itself." From the Brazilian model of nation integration, one may speculate on a structure by
which the people of Carriacou may have developed a unified religion and discrete pantheon. In Brazil, gods are
named and called by drum rhythms; likewise, in Carriacou, these rhythms, perceived as lineage codes, may have
initially been the drum names of principal deities and not politically formed emblems as I had imagined them to be.
In the Carriacou case, the discrete though integral nature of the dance ring suggests a democratic social ideal that
honors national exclusivity and at the same time promotes prestige in social plurality. Blended beside a
multinational African congress, we see that the Big Drum was a consolidated diaspora for national cohesiveness,
spiritual outreach, and the retention of ancestral communication.

Symbolic space, communal rituals, and the surreality of the urban ghetto:
Harlem in Black Literature from the 1920s to the 1960s By Guinter H. Lenz
the complex, often contradictory interrelationship of "society," "community," "culture," and "literature," and de-
or reconstruct it in our interpretation of literary texts? Liminoid phenomena and genres and the dramatization of
communitas I think that the work of anthropologist Victor Turner, especially his books The Ritual Process (1969),
Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors (1974), and the collection of his recent essays From Ritual to Theatre (1982), can
help us in pursuing this question of the exploration and dramatization of cultural and communal identity in the
medium of literature. For Turner, social and cultural change is not the replacement of an old system of values and
attitudes by a new system, both of which can be described as static and consistent systems of "social structures," and
which we then can relate to each other in terms of "survivals," "adaptations," "hidden continuities," or "fundamental
breaks." Turner does not see society as an "abstract system," "whether of social structural relations or of symbols
and meanings," but as "performance," as a "process" that always combines "social structure" and "communitas" (or
"anti-structure") and strives for an ideal "societas" it can never realize (Ritual Process vii; Dramas 274, 238;
"Process, System and Symbol" 78). In terms of time the social process can be understood in analogy to the three
phases of a "rite de passage" (van Gennep). During the middle phase, the "liminal phase," and at the "liminal place,"
the laws of the dominant social structure are suspended and the experience of communitas becomes possible, until
the participants of the "rite" return to a new phase of social structure. Whereas in pre-literate societies the third phase
of the ritual process usually is another social stage, such as in the socialization process of adolescents or in the
initiation into a secret society, in literate societies a liminal phase can be the result of a serious crisis that produces
the experience of communitas as a revolt against the dominating social structure. Particularly in times of radical
structural change a form of communitas manifests itself ("crisis disclosing communitas," in Turner's words) that
transcends the old order and projects an alternative future, but cannot, and must not try to, directly anticipate and
define it in terms of a new social structure or as the realization of the ideal "societas" (Dramas 232, 248, 250). What
is possible during the liminal phase, at a liminal place, is the subversion of the governing notion of reality, a
projection of alternative (not so much directly "opposite") "models for living," the spontaneous experience of
communitas in "social dramas, fields, and metaphors," in symbolic action, in kinds of open, non-teleological rituals.
That is, the liminal phase must not be understood as "anomie," or simply as the transitory stage between two social
structures, or "welt-bilder," but has a qualitatively different status by enacting the power of the imagination and of
potentiality ("no-place and no-time"), "from utopias to programs, which are capable of influencing the behavior of
those in mainstream social and political roles (whether authoritative or dependent, in control or rebelling against it)
in the direction of radical change" (Dramas 250f., 258f.; "Liminal to Liminoid" 65).
Now, in the industrialized and urbanized world, in modern literate societies, which are characterized by the
separation of the spheres of work and leisure, communitas manifests itself in a less direct way. In the context of their
complex, dynamic "symbolic systems and genres," "liminality" must mainly be used in a metaphorical way.
Communitas manifests itself in a "deconstruction" and "dismemberment" of ritual and a "reconstruction" in "esthetic
media": The dismemberment of ritual has, however, proved the opportunity of theater in the high culture and
carnival at the folk level. A multiplicity of desacralized performative genres has assumed, prismatically, the task of
plural cultural reflexivity. The sparagmos (dismemberment) of major liturgical systems, or, in some cases, their
relegation to the periphery of the social process, has resulted in the genesis and elaboration of esthetic media, each
of which takes as its point of departure a component subgenre of traditional ritual. ... If ritual might be compared to a
mirror of mankind, its conversion into a multiplicity of performative arts gives us a hall of magic mirrors, each
reflecting the reflections of the others, and each representing not a simple inversion of mundane reality, but its
systematic magnification and distortion, the ensemble composing a reflexive metacommentary on society and
history as they concern the natural and constructed needs of humankind under given conditions of time and place.
(Ritual Process 73) In industrialized society, "leisure provides the opportunity for a multiplicity of optional, liminoid
[i.e., "liminal-like"] genres [and media]" such as theater, literature, art, music, film, popular culture, sports, games.
This deconstruction and reconstruction, this "experimentation with variable repertoires," happens during leisure time
when the reign of "work" is suspended, often in a problematical way, and in sociocultural "liminoid settings and
spaces" that allow the exploration and the enactment of the potential of communitas, such as "universities,
institutions, colleges" as well as "bars, pubs, some cafes, social clubs" or the theater ("Liminal to Liminoid" 61f.,
64f., 83, 86; "Process, System and Symbol" 68, 72-74, 77).
In summary, Turner char- acterizes liminoid (in contradistinction to liminal) processes and phenomena in the
following way: they -"flourish in societies with 'organic solidarity,' bonded reciprocally by 'contractual' relations,
and generated by and following the industrial revolution," -"may be collective (and when they are so are often
directly derived from liminal antecedents), but are more characteristically individual products, though they often
have collective or 'mass' effects," - "develop apart from the central economic and political processes, along the mar-
gins, in the interstices of central and servicing institutions - they are plural, fragmentary, and experimental in
character," -"tend to be more idiosyncratic or quirky, to be generated by specific named individuals and in particular
groups--'schools,' circles, and coteries," -"are often parts of social critiques or even revolutionary manifestoes-books,
plays, paintings, films, etc., exposing the injustices, inefficiencies, and immor- alities of the mainstream economic
and political structures and organizations" ("Liminal to Liminoid" 84-86). Literature is a liminoid genre that
suspends the laws of social structure and "normal discourse" and transforms social actions into dramatic
performances. But it also can create in its own medium a world of the imagination composed of symbolic spaces and
communal rituals (and their dismemberment) that express and dramatize an alternative or utopian communitas that,
however, must not be read as imitation of, reflection of, or program for, everyday social reality. "The vain task of
trying to find out in what precise way certain symbols found in the ritual, poetry, or iconography of a given society
'reflect' or 'express' its social or political structure can be abandoned" (Dramas 270). Writers, as "exceptionally
liminal thinkers," as "most articulated voices of value" develop "new ways of describing and interpreting
sociocultural experience" (Dramas 15, 17, 28).

ritual rememory
ethnonationalism.

The function of ritual; ritual and symbol analysis the process of ritual
In Schism and Continuity Turner (1957a:298) also noted that many Ndembu rituals "involve the performance of two
successive rituals, separated by a period during which the patient undergoes partial seclusion from secular life."
From Van Gennep's Rites of Passage Turner found the basis for the further development of his ritual analysis: Not
only is ritual situated within a process of social drama; ritual itself is processual in form.
Van Gennep defined rites de passage as "rites which accompany every change of place, state, social position and
age" (Van Gennep [1909] 1960 in Turner 1967:94). Van Gennep indicated that all such rites are marked by a
threefold progression of successive ritual stages: (1) separation or the pre-liminal (after limen, Latin for threshold),
when a person or group becomes detached from an earlier fixed point in the social structure or from an earlier set of
social conditions; (2) margin or the liminal, when the state of the ritual subject is ambiguous; he is no longer in the
old state and has not yet reached the new one; and (3) aggregation or the post-liminal, when the ritual subject enters
a new stable state with its own rights and obligations (Turner 1967:94; 1968b:576-577).
Life-Crisis Rituals and Rituals of Affliction
In his discussions of the ritual complex among the Ndembu, Turner presented the processual view of ritual with a
distinction between life-crisis rituals and rituals of affliction. He had already drawn this distinction in Schism and
Continuity (Turner 1957a:292), but it was not until the introduction to The Forest of Symbols that he elaborated the
model (Turner 1967:7-15).
Life-crisis rituals refer to that class of rituals which mark the transition of one phase in the development of a person
to another phase. Such phases are important points in the physical or social development of the ritual subject, such
as birth, puberty, or death.
Life crisis-rituals among the Ndembu include initiation ceremonies for boys and girls, and funeral rites. Rituals of
affliction, on the other hand, are performed for individuals who are said to have been "caught" by the spirits of
deceased relatives whom they have forgotten or neglected. Those spirits (Turner [1967] uses the term "shades") may
afflict the Ndembu in one of three ways: (1) the shade of a hunter may cause his kinsmen to miss their aim, fail to
find animals to shoot, or drive animals out of range; (2) the shade of a woman may cause her kinswomen to have
reproductive troubles; or (3) shades of both sexes may cause their living kin to become ill in various ways.

In the cultural field, ritual symbols are regarded as clusters of abstract meanings. The dominant symbols are studied
in each ritual performance and in each of its phases. The cultural field encompasses the ritual within the totality of
Ndembu rituals and within the cultural realm of Ndembu religious beliefs. Turner (1968a:14-15) distinguished four
components in Ndembu religion (1) a belief in the existence of a high god (Nzambi) who has created the world but
does not interfere with worldly human activities (this god is largely absent from Ndembu ritual and prayer); (2) a
belief in the existence of ancestor spirits or "shades" who may afflict the Ndembu (their importance is manifested by
the numerous performances of rituals of affliction among the Ndembu); (3) a belief in the intrinsic efficacy of
certain animal and vegetable substances; and (4) a belief in the destructive power of female witches and male
sorcerers.

ANTI-STRUCTURE:
LIMINALITY AND COMMUNITAS
Having adopted the processual view on ritual from Van Gennep, Turner throughout his work repeatedly discussed
the importance of the liminal, intermediate phase in ritual. In 1967, when Turner left Cornell University to become a
professor of social thought and anthropology at the University of Chicago, he had already published The Forest of
Symbols (Turner 1967) in which his republished essay on Van Gennep occupied a central place.
Then came the publication of The Drums of Affliction (Turner 1968a), a work which reveals no theoretical
innovations but offers detailed accounts of the Ndembu ritual complex, followed by The Ritual Process (Turner
1969a). These three consecutively published books are very much the central core of Turner's approach to ritual.
Among these The Ritual Process, the publication of Turner's Henry Morgan Lectures which be delivered at the
University of Rochester in April 1966, is most crucial, for it is the work in which Turner discussed the concepts of
liminality and communitas at some length, and at the same time, it is the work in which he was led away from an
exclusive study of Ndembu ritual and started to focus on phenomena in complex societies.
1969a:95).
Turner distinguished analytically three (in actual ritual performances, often interwoven) components of liminality
(Turner 1967:99-108; 1985a:291-301; V. Turner and E. Turner 1982:203- 206): (1) communication of sacra, where
secret symbols are communicated to the ritual subjects in the form of exhibitions of sacred articles (relics, masks,
instruments, "what is shown,"), actions (dancing, "what is done") and instructions (mythical history, "what is said") ;
the symbols represent the unity and continuity of the community; they are simple in form, but, because of their
multivocality, they are often given complex cultural interpretations; (2) ludic deconstruction and
recombination of familiar cultural configurations, which refers to the exaggeration or distortion of the characteristics
of familiar articles in the sacra; familiar objects are often presented in distorted, deviant or grotesque forms (in
smaller or larger shape, in other colors); these representations force the ritual adepts to think about their society; they
provoke the ritual subjects to reflect on the basic values of their social and cosmological order; and (3)
simplification of the relations of the social structure, in which the only remaining structural characteristic in
liminality is the authority of the ritual instructors over the completely submissive and obedient adepts; between the
ritual subjects the sociostructural distinctions disappear in favor of an absolute equality. It is this third component of
liminality, the "sameness" of the liminal personae, which led Turner to develop his notion of communitas
Communitas: General Characteristics and Types
In his first essay on the processual form of ritual, Turner (1964a, reprinted in Turner 1967:93-111) noted that the
ritual subjects during the liminal phase in a ritual performance are all treated equally, deprived of all distinguishing
characteristics of social structure, constituting "a community or comity of comrades and not a structure of
hierarchically arrayed positions" (Turner 1967:100). In The Ritual Process Turner introduced the concept of
communitas to denote this feeling of comradeship among the liminal personae. According to Turner (1975:21), the
first empirical base for this concept was his experience of friendship while he was a non-combatant soldier during
World War II, but it was not until his analysis of the Ndembu ritual complex that he became fully aware of its
theoretical relevance.
Communitas can generally be defined in opposition to structure:
Communitas appears where structure does not (Turner 1969a:94- 97, 125-130). Social structure refers to an
arrangement of positions or statuses. As Turner discovered from his analysis of passage rites among the Ndembu,
the characteristics of the social structure are no longer and not yet applicable during the intermediate period of
liminality in ritual. What is brought about in liminality is what Turner called communitas, a term he adopted with a
different meaning from that of Paul Goodman (Goodman and Goodman 1947).
In Turner's work, communitas in rituals refers to liminality, marginality, inferiority, and equality (Turner 1969a:94-
97, 125- 130; 1974a:45-55). The ritual subjects are during the seclusion period "neither here nor there"; they are
subjected to the rest of the community and treated as equals to one another, creating a generic bond and a sentiment
of "humankindness" between them. As such, communitas refers to one of the three components of the liminal phase
in rituals. Yet there is more.
It was Turner's notion of social drama (still very much a functionalist device) in combination with Van Gennep's
influential work on rites of passage which, I believe, led Turner to analyze ritual not simply as a mechanism of
redress, but as humanly meaningful cultural performances of an essentially processual nature. Ritual not only
takes place within a social process but is itself processual. In his studies of the liminal phase in ritual, Turner showed
that ritual is not just a response to society's needs but involves humanly meaningful action. In this way, Turner's
mode of analysis has been an important alternative for often all too static socialstructural analyses, and it may
continue to stimulate research on ritual to contribute to a comprehensive understanding of ritual's role both in human
thought and in action.

Thresholds, liminality and fruitful chaos, Stephen Bigger
Revolutionary change in education? Review Article: Victor Turner, Liminality and Cultural Performance
Crossing the threshold between childhood and adulthood in his African fieldwork inspired the anthropologist Victor
Turner to unpack the significance of the betwixt and between state he termed liminal, applying both to the
individual and to the community. Convinced that social ritual had a crucial role of changing attitudes, he applied this
to western society by emphasising processes of social change, particularly where they involved ceremony,
performance and carnival. He viewed this process as healing social rifts and psychic disharmony, whether expressed
in religious or secular language. Extending this, he argued for the importance of social drama/performance generally
as an aspect of social change, which he argued can have a therapeutic role to people and communities. For this
community action he coined the term communitas within a general process of anti-structure (that is, pressure to
change structure).
Liminality, or threshold crossing, has dominated the pioneering work of Victor Turner from his time as an
anthropologist in Africa in the 1950s and 1960s. Turner, after fieldwork in Africa, read Arnold van Genneps
1908 Rites of Passage (1960/1908) and realised that it made sense of his own findings. Van Gennep, from
Australian aborigine data, produced a schema to describe dangerous life transitions or thresholds (birth, puberty,
marriage and death). The French word passage for passing through such a threshold has since become a loan word in
English. His argument was rooted in tribal superstition in which people saw life crises as moments of psychic or
spiritual (i.e. magico-religious) danger as evil spirits or ancestors might interfere to harm the child or the
community perils of an ultra-human order (Turner, 1962: 37, 249) which require religious rites. Ritual attempted
to pacify the evil forces and bring their world back to a state of equilibrium. Interested in the sacred, Van Gennep
explored notions of animism and dynamism, spirits and powers to explain the purpose of such rites. A contemporary
of mile Durkheim, he was a positivist rationalist who wished to explain ritual and religion naturalistically and
socially. For issues of life and death (pregnancy, birth, beginning sexuality and marriage, death, his order) he
proposed a three-part schema described as separation (that is, spiritual retreat), transition (French marge) and
incorporation (French agrgation). If we picture society as a house (Van Gennep, 1960 [1908] p.26) people need
permission to enter new rooms. The threshold, or limen, was the key to their passage or transition from one room
[state] to another. For a short time the person is in-between statuses. Turners favourite phrase was betwixt and
between (Turner, 1967). Liminality ritual aimed to reduce the potential threat of this.
Van Gennep concludes (p.189): Our brief examination of the ceremonies through which an individual passes on all
the most important occasions of his life has now been completed.We have seen that an individual is placed in
various sections of society, synchronically and in succession; in order to pass from one category to another and join
individuals in other sections, he must submit, from the day of his birth to that of his death, to ceremonies whose
forms often vary but whose function is similar.
This sounds very general, and he gives a few examples of other changes of status, such as a slave changing owners,
or a stranger moving into a new territory. This is however less well defined than his chapters on life crises. The
anthropology is primitive, and his assumption of evolutionary cultural progress, a fad of his time, is now seen as
flawed. His interest in the function of ritual did develop further in anthropology, but Van Gennep was largely
ignored, even after the translation of his work into English in 1960. For example, a study of life crises (birth,
puberty, marriage, death) in Ethiopia in 1971 (Callender and Guindi, 1970) makes no mention of rites of passage
or Van Gennep.
The process of potential change he called liminality, as it involved an in-between state betwixt and between,
reshaping the status quo. He argued that communities were more dominated by dynamic change-processes than they
were with static structures, as contemporary structuralists taught: he therefore preferred the term processual to
structural and spoke of anti-structure (Turner, 1969) for processes that broke structures down.
Thresholds lie between states or statuses, which the individual needs to cross and the community needs to
recognise the change. In The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure (1969), his processual model describes
change as a dynamic process. Structure means the social and power structure, the current status quo, the top-down
authority system. Turners anti-structure refers to aspects beyond this, which puts pressure on structure, the bottom
up struggle for change. This produces social action and cooperation which he calls communitas, meaning all positive
aspects of community and togetherness.
Communitas ispart of the serious life. It tends to ignore, reverse, cut across, or occur outside of structural
relationships representing the desire for a total, unmediated relationship which nevertheless does not submerge
one in the other but safeguards their uniqueness in the very act of realizing their commonness. (Turner, 1974a:274)
Communitas is marked by individual freedom, ignoring structure and promoting spontaneity. It is playful but
serious, functioning as a change agent; for Turner it was eufunctional, making the social structure work without too
much friction (Turner, 1982: 54), having the potential for stability but not destruction.
Liminality can perhaps be described as a fructile chaos, a fertile nothingness, a storehouse of possibilitiesa
Stephen Bigger

Bit by bit, along with the others,
she had claimed herself. Freeing yourself was one thing;
claiming ownership of that freed self was another.
Toni Morrison, on Sethe.

Heard about the Ibos Landing? Thats the place where they bring the Ibos over in a slave ship
and when they get here, they aint like it and so they all start singing and they march right down in
the river to march back to Africa, but they aint able to get there. They gets drown.
- Floyd White, Georgia Writers Project interview,


Lots of slaves what was brung over from Africa could fly. There was a crowd of them
working in the field. They dont like it here and they think they go back to Africa. One by one
they fly up in the air and all fly off and gone back to Africa.
Jack Tattnall, Georgia Writers Project interview, in Georgia Writers Project,
Drums and Shadows: Survival Stories among the Georgia Coastal Negroes (1940; Athens, Ga., 1986)

Terri L. Snyder

Lots of slaves what was brung over from Africa could fly. There was a crowd of them working in that field. They
dont like it here and they think they go back to Africa. One by one they fly and all fly off and gone back to Africa.
Jack Tattnall, from oral history collected from former slaves, 1930s;
Drums and Shadows, 1940.

When ex-slaves were interviewed by the Federal Writers Project in the 1930s, the subject of suicide rarely surfaced.
Exceptions to this silence about slave self-destruction came from the particular region of the Georgia and South
Carolina Sea Islands where ex-slaves and their children related stories, similar to Jack Tattnalls, of Africans who
literally had the power to take flight to escape enslavement. The flying African folktale probably has its historical
roots in an 1803 collective suicide by newly imported slaves. A group of Igbo (variously, Ebo or Igbo) captives who
had survived the middle passage were sold near Savannah, Georgia, and reloaded onto a small ship bound for St.
Simons Island. Off the coast of the island, the enslaved cargo, who had suffered much by mismanagement, rose
from their confinement in the small vessel, and revolted against the crew, forcing them into the water where they
drowned. After the ship ran aground, the Igbos took to the marsh and drowned themselves - an act that most
scholars have understood as a deliberate, collective suicide. The site of their fatal immersion was named Ebos
Landing.
The fate of those Igbo in 1803 gave rise to a distinctive regional folklore and a place name, but both individual and
collective suicide were also part of the general history of North American slavery. From the start of the transatlantic
slave trade, mariners, merchants, and masters exchanged reports of slave suicide along with their human traffic, and
they noted alarmingly that captive Africans often responded to enslavement by destroying themselves. Some ship
captains kept account of their cargo losses for investors and insurers; one study of surgeons logs for the period
17921796 reveals that 7.2 percent of captive Africans killed themselves at some point during capture, embarkation,
or along the middle passage. Particularly at loading points on the African coast and aboard ships during the middle
passage, captive Africans self-destruction was common enough to warrant the use of the earliest technologies for
suicide prevention.
While some captive Africans viewed suicide as an honorable escape from slavery, for early modern Anglo- and
European Americans, suicide - what they termed self-murder- was a sinful act and also a felony that carried
substantial penalties. Individuals who killed themselves could be denied Christian burial rites, and their bodies could
be subjected to post-mortem desecration; their surviving families could also be penalized financially and socially.
Such societal attitudes might appear to have had no bearing on enslaved people, who lacked personhood under the
law; nevertheless, slaves who killed themselves often reflected badly on their masters, some of whom worked to
conceal evidence of slave selfdestruction.
Terri L. Snyder

This article widens the traditional scope of evidence to consider slave self-destruction from multiple perspectives
and chronological moments and more effectively places suicide within the long history of North American slavery.
Slave suicide often has been rightly perceived as a form of defiance; indeed, Michael Gomez assesses suicide as
perhaps the ultimate form of resistance.
the act of self-destruction and its various meanings within the context of slavery. Suicide by slaves might signal
cultural continuity with ethnic African attitudes about choosing death rather than dishonor, or it might be seen as an
entirely reasonable - if not outright revolutionary - response to enslavement. Suicide might have been a source of
spiritual relief for slaves: a means for African-born slaves to transmigrate to Africa or a way for native-born
Christian slaves to reach heaven. Suicide might also be understood as an aggressive act toward others, as an
expression of gendered entitlement, or as an escape from physical or emotional pain.
Using Saidiya V. Hartmans argument that memory is not simply an inventory of what went before, but is, rather, a
bridge from the past to the present that redresses the wrongs of history, the stories can also be seen as corrective
measures.8 In this sense, flying African folklore demonstrates the power of cultural memory to reshape past
tragedies, transforming stories of suicide into stories of strength and propelling them into the future.
Heard about the Ibos Landing? Thats the place where they bring the Ibos over in a slave ship and when they get
here, they aint like it and so they all start singing and they march right down in the river to march back to Africa,
but they aint able to get there. They gets drown. - Floyd White, Georgia Writers Project interview, in Georgia
Writers Project, Drums and Shadows.
Ball asserted that self-destruction was much more frequent among the slaves in the cotton region than is generally
supposed and added that he did not marvel that the slaves who are driven to the south often destroy themselves.
His comments suggest that the social and cultural dislocations created by the transatlantic slave trade and the middle
passage continued to shape the self-destructive impulses of slaves who were born in the United States and traded
domestically.
... Other observers of slave self-destruction appealed to essentialism. They explained suicide as a predilection of
newly imported slaves of a particular age or ethnicity rather than as a response to enslavement. Planters were
also warned against obtaining captives from particular nations. The Sugar Cane counseled planters to fly, with care,
from the Moco nation, because they themselves destroy and to avoid Coromontee who chuse death before
dishonorable bonds. Merchants such as Henry Laurens of South Carolina wrote that Igbos were quite out of repute
from numbers in every Cargo . . . destroying themselves.
ritual rememory
ethnonationalism.

The rise of antislavery sentiment and the move to decriminalize suicide raised questions about individual rights and
human liberty. Some political theorists argued that subjects and citizens bore an obligation to keep themselves alive,
while others saw self-destruction as a tragic but ultimately individual right that was not the business of the state.
Even today, suicide uneasily measures the divide between private will and public interest. Beginning in the
eighteenth century, antislavery activists - including exslaves - used self-destruction to illustrate the wrongs of
slavery, the denial of liberty, and the immorality of arbitrary power. Such themes - natural rights, the entitlements of
the self, and the extent of individual liberty - were central to the cultural and political debates that mark the
emergence of the modern era. On occasion, arguments about slavery and suicide literally invoked one another.
When John Locke asserted that freedom from arbitrary power was a natural right, he used the example of a slaves
choice to die to illustrate his point. Locke argued that whenever a slave found that the hardship of slavery
outweighed the value of his life, it is in his power, by resisting the will of his master, to draw on himself the death
he desires.
Terri L. Snyder



My gran use to tell me about folks flying back to Africa. A man and his wife
was brung from Africa. When they find out they was slaves and got treat so hard,
they just fret and fret. One day, they was standing with some other slaves and all of a sudden they say,
We going back to Africa. So goodie bye, goodie bye. Then they flied right out of sight.
- Mose Brown, Georgia Writers Project interview,

Terri L. Snyder
According to Gomez, however, the dislocations of the transatlantic slave trade eroded those traditional taboos. Other
African ethnic groups, including the Yoruba and the Ashanti, did not equate suicide with jeopardizing ones soul,
social standing, or family reputation. Indeed, in some instances, suicide was deemed an honorable act, particularly if
it provided an escape from a dishonorable status such as that created by slavery. Daniel E. Walker also argues that
captive Africans who desired spiritual transmigration and a return to Africa took courses of action that they fully
understood might lead to death.
Walker considers the contempt for death as it was manifested in the specific context of collective slave resistance
and revolt. In that sense, captives behaviors can be seen as parallels to Huey P. Newtons definition of
revolutionary suicide: that it is better to fight the forces of oppression that lead to despair rather than to endure them,
even if the fight means risking death.26
Slaves might have understood that even death by suicide was preferable to life under slavery because, however it
was obtained, death brought the possibility of transmigrating and returning home to Africa. They therefore prepared
for death in a ritualistic manner or with materials they believed would aid their journey. Ship captains and planters
alike understood this motivation for suicide and dismembered the recovered corpses, telling slaves that desecration
would prevent their return to Africa. There is no evidence that such a method of deterrence worked. Before killing
themselves, for instance, newly imported slaves would put on or remove all of their clothes, place food and water
nearby, or wrap chains around their waists; they believed that these actions and objects would sustain them through
the transmigration, regardless of whether the act of self-destruction was individual or collective.
The idea of transmigration also often dictated the methods of suicide. Drowning was preferable because water was
seen as the spiritual conduit back to Africa; hanging in the woods was also acceptable because it allowed for ritual
preparation. The extent to which those beliefs were sustained through the generation of native-born slaves in North
America is difficult to know. It is certainly true that drowning and hanging were the predominant methods chosen by
both African and African American slaves; even so, such methods also had class connections and may have merely
reflected a lack of access to the laudanum or firearms preferred by suicidal upper-class whites.
In many instances, the horrors of slavery drew responses of refusal and isolation. The physician and author Jesse
Torrey gives several accounts of female slaves who leaped from windows, jumped into rivers, or cut their throats
rather than face separation from their families.
The subject of the 1825 lawsuit Ritchie v. Wilson was a female slave who drowned herself after improper and cruel
treatment, suggesting that she refused to tolerate further brutality. Similar themes surface in ex-slave narratives.
Fannie Berry relates the story of her Aunt Nellie, who told witnesses that she had suffered her last whipping and
climbed top of a hill an rolled down. Those who found her body noticed that an untouched bundle of bread and
food lay beside it - perhaps a ritual accompaniment to suicide like that used by slaves a century earlier. Ida
Hutchinson Blackshear also recalled that one woman, a frequent runaway who vexed her would-be captors, went to
the slough and drowned herself rather than let the patrollers beat her and mark her up.35
Slave suicide was also part of a pattern of collective slave resistance. In Virginia, slaves attempted at least eleven
collective revolts in the course of the eighteenth century, and suicide may have been a response to a failed
insurrection. In 1736, an unnamed female slave broke into a storehouse, stole goods, wounded her masters son,
burned a tobacco storehouse, murdered her children and other slaves, and drowned herself. In 1774, when her master
was at church, a woman named Juda set fire to her house and her masters house, murdered her son, and deliberately
rushed into the dwelling house to her certain death.37 It is possible to read those slave actions as preludes to or
instigators of collective revolt as much as it is possible to read them as purely individual acts of resistance. Many
early slave suicides in the South were like Rogers: a solitary act of self-directed violence performed in isolation. In
contrast, the suicides of Juda and the unnamed female slave include elements that were common features of
collective slave resistance: master-directed violence, arson, purloined goods. Moreover, the sequence of events
surrounding those suicides begins with the seizure and destruction of material property; murder and selfmurder are
the final stages of the progression. It is possible that those slaves were initiating a revolt that failed to materialize
and that they chose death at their own hands rather than being hanged for treasona measure of how anticipatory
violence fostered self-destructive impulses within the slave community.

In similar circumstances, other slaves also killed themselves before the state had an opportunity. In 1837, the
Rutherford (N.C.) Gazette printed the story of Lucy, a runaway slave who hanged herself rather than face recapture.
The newspaper commented on the firmness of her resolve, far beyond that exhibited by any person, because the
place from which she suspended herself was not high enough to prevent her feet from touching the floor and it was
only by drawing her legs up, and remaining in that position, that she succeeded in her determined purpose.38 In
1860, the Macon (Ga.) Daily Telegraph reported that, while awaiting trial, the enslaved John deliberately choked
himself, in a manner similar to Lucys.39

Terri L. Snyder

Ex-slave memories do not mention any of the material elements that captive Africans used in ritual preparation for
suicide (such as singing, bundled clothing, or food), but several of their accounts explain that there was often a
collective ritual shout as a prelude to flight. Hamilton mentioned shouts of goodie bye, but another slave
remembers the words as quack, quack, quack.
While we do not know the gender composition of the captive Igbo in 1803, gender also figures importantly in ex-
slave memories of flying Africans. In the ex-slave telling, no single leader is remembered; instead, they refer to a
couple, a man and wife, and it is the ritual magic performed collectively - by men and women together - that
channels the power to escape enslavement and fly back to Africa. In the version of the story remembered by
Hamilton, the couple (this man and his wife), together, decides we going back home. In contrast, the Works
Progress Administration interviewers rendering of the flying Africans as well as folktales published in the 1940s
are built on a more patriarchal model that focuses on one central male figure that empowers other slaves to fly. The
Georgia Writers Project interviewers, for example, describe the 1803 Igbo as a group of slaves who were led by
their chief as they deliberately walked into the water to their deaths. In one version of the flying African tale
published in the 1940s, a woman took her breast with her hand and threw it over her shoulder that the child might
suck and be content as she labored in the masters fields. Her child continues to nurse, even after taking flight, as
do all of the children who laughed and sucked as their mothers flew and were not afraid. Added to the sense of
power that is conveyed by the ability to literally fly away from slavery is the power represented by African
American women suckling over their shoulders - an image with deep and troublesome roots in the European
imagination.
If the flying African folklore provides a reprieve from domination for the Igbo as they fly back to Africa rather
than drown, the reprieve is tempered by one ex-slaves recollections of Mr. Blue, whose figure loomed large over
the dispersal of their families and communities in Quartermans own experience in slavery.46 The great sale was not
a suicide, of course, but the separation it engendered paralleled the permanence of a mythical return to Africa. Like
many of those who were dispersed in the great sale, flying Africans were never seen again by those who watched
and remembered their departure.
The flying African stories lie at the crossroads of memory and history. At that point, the tales are an attempt at some
restoration of the losses from suicide and separation that were necessitated by the slave trade. The stories assert the
power of culture to maintain community in the face of its forcible dislocation. Sullen stubbornness and sentimental
despair - characteristic of accounts of slave suicide in the early modern and early Republican eras - have no role in
the tales, although the ecology of slave suicide is present in the form of refusals, brutality, labor regimes, and
separation. Flying African folklore allows for the possibility of escaping slavery through the supernatural power of
refusal rather than through self-destructive violence. Like both the African- and North American - born slaves who
contemplated or chose self-inflicted death, flying Africans also made a choice.

Terri L. Snyder
Collective memory conferred upon them the power to fly - to escape slavery and to return home. Ex-slave memories
and folklore perform the cultural work of remaking the history of the self, the family, and the community within
slavery, ultimately transforming the crossroads of despair, suicide, and separation into an intersection of power,
transcendence, and reunion.
When they reached land, the Ebo chief began chanting,
"The Sea brought me and the Sea will bring me home." There was no questioning the chief's decisions. They all
began chanting together. Chained one to the other, they refused to walk into a life of slavery and instead turned and
followed their chief into the water. The site of their fatal immersion is named Ebos Landing.
Terri L. Snyder

We Shall Be No More: Richard Bell
Review by John Wood Sweet

In the early decades of the United States, Richard Bell argues, suicide suddenly seemed to be everywhere. From the
end of the Revolution to the Civil War, suicide was a major theme in a range of public debates - about the
potentially corrupting influence of sentimental novels, about the right or even obligation of paternalistic reformers to
thwart the will of self-destructive individuals, about the creation of new institutions to house those diagnosed as
mentally ill, about the implications of capital punishment, about the dangers of wrong religion, and about the
morality of slavery. Unlike some of the cultural histories of suicide that have proliferated in recent years, Bells
approach is not to count suicides, compare suicide rates, or investigate why individuals sought to end their lives.
Instead, he focuses on the meanings associated with suicide in public debates in which ideas about self-government
and the new nations political culture were contested. To this end, Bell embraces suicides semiotic ambiguity: As
they fought over the meaning of suicide, the early Republics culture warriors used its finality and extremity to
advance all manner of agendas - some conservative, others radical. What underlay all of these debates, Bell
concludes, was a broad contestation in American political culture between proponents of order, hierarchy, and
community and champions of liberty, independence, and individualism.
For those concerned about the slackening hold of paternalism in an age of social tumult, suicide embodied the
selfish individualism and moral degeneracy that threatened to doom the republican experiment to self-destruction.
The sentimental novel is a classic case in point. As Bell points out, The suicides of young men unlucky in love or
young women ruined by seduction punctuate the plots of many of the most popular novels and short stories,
including not only the most popular European novels such as Johann
Wolfgang von Goethes The Sorrows of Young Werther but also fully one-third of novels published by Americans
between 1780 and 1810. Many observers worried that such representations were morally suspect and socially
dangerous, challenging both religious and patriarchal authority simultaneously. The storm of criticism about how
popular fiction handled suicide is best understood as an expression of the anxious response of elites to the broader
crisis of moral authority in the early Republic, Bell writes.
The issues of will, reason, and self-governance were also at the center of debates over the efforts of benevolent
societies and medical authorities to manage the problem of suicide. Inspired by European examples, urban elites
across the new Republic organized humane societies dedicated to preventing drownings - not only accidents, but
also attempted suicides. By extending their moral responsibility to the welfare of strangers, Bell emphasizes,
members of these societies hoped to remind ordinary citizens of the ties of mutual obligation and aid that they
believed had traditionally bound smaller, less factious communities together. Of course, not all people who
attempted suicide wanted to be rescued. Bell recounts a powerful confrontation between a young man who had taken
a slow-acting dose of poison and the doctor called in to keep him alive. The physician insisted on his authority to
administer treatment. The young man insisted on his right to self-determination. The good doctor ultimately got
around the problem of consent with trickery. But the implicit issues of authority, will, and sanity were more difficult
to dismiss and ultimately prompted the replacement of the humane societies with private and state-sponsored mental
asylums. Employing a rationale that echoed new thinking in legal circles about property rights, state governments
now asserted something resembling eminent domain over the lives of those they thought might misuse the privilege
of independent custodianship.
Similar concerns about state authority and the will of individuals emerged at the center of debates over the death
penalty. All too often, according to various observers, prisoners under sentence of death cheated the hangmanand
the crowds of execution-day onlookers - by taking their own lives. Paternalists wrung their hands about such
defiance against the laws of God and the authority of the state. Others, using the kinds of contagion argument used
to attack novels, argued that public executions were an unhealthy influence on the body politic. Untroubled by an
absence of evidence, they claimed that suicides by rope were actually liable to increase sharply among those who
saw the state repeatedly hang men by their necks. Such concerns prompted a number of states to ban public
hangings. Another line of debate developed over the legitimacy of the death penalty itself. Antigallows activists
argued that the brutality of the death penalty could be measured in the number of suicides it generated. Their
opponents claimed that the death penalty was crucial to the maintenance of social order. Neither side in this debate
gained a decisive victory in the decades before the Civil War. Meanwhile, as Bell shows, Congregationalists,
Presbyterians, and Methodists seized on the Universalists opposition to the death penalty in their efforts to brand
them as little more than a suicide cult slavishly followed by deists and deviants who could not tell right from
wrong.

We Shall Be No More: Richard Bell
Review by John Wood Sweet

Bell ends with a discussion of the role of suicide in antislavery efforts from the revolutionary era to the Civil War. In
eighteenth-century antislavery propaganda, enslaved people driven to suicide were recurrent figures. They
dramatized the inhumanity of the slave trade and plantation slavery, and they cast enslaved Africans as people of
sensibility and honor. After a lull in large-scale antislavery activism in the early nineteenth century, the movement
that William Garrison helped rekindle in the 1830s turned away from an earlier emphasis on masculine honor,
heroism, and violent resistance. Desperate and distracted wives or mothers, torn from their children or otherwise
abused, now took center stage (224). While this brand of humanitarianism was powerful and widespread, a more
radical, revolutionary-era emphasis reemerged after 1840 as an important strain in the national antislavery debate,
championing the legitimacy of direct, violent, and even self-destructive, resistance: Liberty Or Death, Henry
Highland Garnet exhorted in 1843. Brethren, arise, arise! Strike for your lives and liberties. Now is the day and the
hour. Let every slave throughout the land do this, and the days of slavery are numbered (236).
Bell concludes, convincingly, that that suicide was an important locus for contesting some of the most
consequential questions facing the new Republic (249). Between the Revolution and Reconstruction, Americans
engaged in an all-consuming ideological struggle to reconcile the expansion of individual liberty with the
imperatives of coexistence and mutual obligation (265). Of course, this characterization of the issues at stake in the
early Republics political culture is hardly noveland that fact highlights some of the basic challenges and
ambitions of Bells project. In exploring the contested meanings of suicide in a wide range of contexts over a period
of about a century, Bell travels a series of highly trafficked historiographical pathways. For example, few readers of
Cathy N. Davidsons Revolution and the Word will be surprised that the novels of the early Republic were widely
seen as revolutionary - and not always in a good way.2 Bells purpose is not so much to overturn established
paradigms as it is to add nuance and subtlety to ongoing interpretive discussions, which he typically does with
admirable grace and analytic precision. What is most original about this study is its effort at synthesisemploying
the fil rouge of suicide as a guide through the diverse, bumptious, and wide-ranging struggle over self-governance
and political order during a momentous period in American history.



1969a:95).
Anti-structure: liminality and communitas

A Discussion of Victor Turners Processual Symbolic Analysis.
The social dramas among the Ndembu exhibit a processual form (Turner [1957a:91] uses the term "processional"),
following a pattern of four phases: Ritual, Anti-Structure, and Religion: Discussion of Victor Turner's Processual
Symbolic Analysis (Mathieu Deflem) breach of regular norm-governed social relationships between persons or
groups of a social unit; a crisis or extension of the breach, unless the conflict can be sealed off quickly; adjustive and
redressive mechanisms brought into operation by leading members of the social group; and reintegration of the
disturbed social group or social recognition of an irreparable breach or schism (91-94).

ritual rememory
ethnonationalism.

The state of mind entered he called liminal, betwixt and between (Turner, 1967). Turner contrasted (1969)
social structure (e.g. status, power, top-down authority) with anti-structure (bottom-up creative responses and
pressures to change). Anti-structure is the liminal arena; the greater the powerlessness, the greater the need for
positive anti-structural activities, which he styled communitas (positive community activities). Generally he viewed
communitas as ritual-as-social-drama. He argued that process takes precedence over structure. Life is fluid, and
messy. Structure can get undermined by these processes.
Lewis translates communitas into embodied experience [p.52] which might include singing and dancing. Turner
linked this to explanation: the voices of participants and outsiders linked together into polyvocality and
multiperspectival work [p.53]. Lewis emphasised the shared experience of the participants as they shared touch,
taste, smells, sights and sounds. He used the terms intersubjectivity and intercorporeality. He retained the
distinction between special events and everyday life, which interact; order and disorder; the potential for events to
become patterned [performativity]; the creativity of play and the solemnity of ritual. Alongside the human potential
for liberation he places the opposite tendency for destruction.

His arguments for a positive liminal state of mind, which he called communitas, also has potential for inspiring
creative beyond the box approaches. This is bottom-up, multi-perspectival, democratic or in his terminology
anti-structural, beyond authority structures. Turner drew all this from the idea that ritual is transformative, even
therapeutic, social drama, not only functional but eufunctional - viz. working for good. This is an attempt to define
the creative process, and is still inspiring research and practice. Creativity as threshold still has potential to be
developed. However, Turners notion of all ritual being social drama is an overgeneralisation. Some ritual is
traditional, nostalgic and as regards new insights, quite dead. Tribal rituals studies in anthropology were capable of
more dynamic interpretation, with rituals solving social disputes, but Turner was not justified to interpret all ritual as
explained by this model. It is reasonable to use these dynamic rituals as a model for transformational theatre, but not
all theatre is life-enhancing. The concept helps us to evaluate ritual, distinguishing between rituals which reconcile
disputes, which affirm identity and community, and which are nostalgic and static.

Thresholds, liminality and fruitful chaos:
revolutionary change in education? Stephen Bigger
Van Gennephe proposed a three-part schema described as separation (that is, spiritual retreat), transition (French
marge) and incorporation (French agrgation). If we picture society as a house (Van Gennep, 1960 [1908] p.26)
people need permission to enter new rooms. The threshold, or limen, was the key to their passage or transition from
one room [state] to another. For a short time the person is in-between statuses. Turners favourite phrase was
betwixt and between (Turner, 1967). Liminality ritual aimed to reduce the potential threat of this.
Van Gennep concludes (p.189): Our brief examination of the ceremonies through which an individual passes on all
the most important occasions of his life has now been completed.We have seen that an individual is placed in
various sections of society, synchronically and in succession; in order to pass from one category to another and join
individuals in other sections, he must submit, from the day of his birth to that of his death, to ceremonies whose
forms often vary but whose function is similar.

In The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure (1969), his processual model describes change as a dynamic
process. Structure means the social and power structure, the current status quo, the top-down authority system.
Turners anti-structure refers to aspects beyond this, which puts pressure on structure, the bottom up struggle for
change. This produces social action and cooperation which he calls communitas, meaning all positive aspects of
community and togetherness.
Communitas is part of the serious life. It tends to ignore, reverse, cut across, or occur outside of structural
relationships representing the desire for a total, unmediated relationship which nevertheless does not submerge
one in the other but safeguards their uniqueness in the very act of realizing their commonness. (Turner, 1974a:274)
Communitas is marked by individual freedom, ignoring structure and promoting spontaneity. It is playful but
serious, functioning as a change agent; for Turner it was eufunctional, making the social structure work without too
much friction (Turner, 1982: 54), having the potential for stability but not destruction.
Liminality can perhaps be described as a fructile chaos, a fertile nothingness, a storehouse of possibilitiesa
the social field that is that individual behaviour is inextricably connected to the social context. His change
schema parallels the liminal process: current structures have to be unfrozen (separating people from how things
used to be); then the change or transition takes place (the locus of liminality) in some memorable form such as
ceremony or ritual; then the new status quo has to be consolidated through freezing/refreezing. At a point of
transition, the old has to metamorphose into the new. The less this change is feared, the smoother the transition will
be.

For Turner, revolutionary change came from ritual, which mended a breach and healed the community, a Hegelian
synthesis. In his view, ritual is an important mechanism for social change, in that it mobilises whole populations
to refocus themselves. Calling it social drama he broadened the notion of ritual to ceremony and carnival.
Revolutionary change has to be bottom up, experience based or experience simulated. In my view this is not a
sudden revolution but a gradual one but a revolution nevertheless.


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My plan was to take us all to the other side where my own ma'am is.

They stopped me from getting us there, but they didn't stop

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