Rethinking the African Diaspora: The Making of a Black Atlantic World in the Bight of Benin and Brazil

One of the most heavily travelled migration routes from Old World to New was the trajectory of slave ships that left the coast of West Africa along the Bight of Benin and landed their human cargo in Brazil. An estimated two million persons over the course of some 250 years were forced migrants along this route, arriving mainly in the Brazilian province of Bahia. Earlier generations of scholars studied this southern portion of the slave trade simply as an east-west movement of enslaved persons stripped of identity and culture, or they looked for possible retentions of Africa among descendants of slaves in the Americas. As a result of new research, we can now paint a more complex picture of peoples and cultures in the south Atlantic, from the earliest period of the slave trade up to the present. The nine papers in this volume indicate that a dynamic and continuous movement of peoples east as well as west across the Atlantic forged diverse and vibrant re-inventions and re-interpretations of the rich mix of cultures represented by Africans and peoples of African descent on both continents.