Lexington Books Shackled Sentiments: Slaves, Spirits, and Memories in the African Diaspora

The ramifications of the trans-Saharan, trans-Atlantic, Indian Ocean, and domestic African slave trades are immeasurable, and they continue to disaffect black people from Africa to Haiti and Los Angeles to Lagos. Shackled Sentiments focuses on the memories and embodiments of slavery through case studies from western, eastern, and central Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America. The contributors to this collection examine the ways that memories of slavery have been internalized. Slavery and memory are assessed from multiple perspectives: as sets of ritual practices, community-based systems of spirit veneration, mechanisms of resistance and national pride, sacred languages informing personhood, and instruments for healing and well-being. This book is recommended for scholars of anthropology, history, religion, art, and linguistics. Review The authors offer a collection of dynamic, cross-cultural analyses that represent new approaches to understanding how African descendant communities have "erected their own belief and moral system in response to institutionalized slavery" (p. xxiii). Taken together, the essays make one of the strongest cases yet for multidisciplinary scholarship that examines and compares local and regional conceptions of ritual, religion, and historical memory over time.-- "BRILL"Shackled Sentiments is a most welcome, unique, and important book. This collection provides an international and interdisciplinary approach to one of the gravest and most haunting of all human conditions or crimes: slavery. Eric Montgomery is to be resoundingly applauded for culling expert voices from throughout the Atlantic world to offer in a single collection the fine chapters on offer in Shackled Sentiments. In addition to providing readers with new knowledge about slavery, this volume offers compelling new insights about the historical and geographic reaches, ramifications, and contours of slavery, and it should inspire deep humanistic reflection not just on this topic but about our very existence as a species.--Terry Rey, Temple University About the Author Eric J. Montgomery is cultural anthropologist at the Center for Peace and Conflict Studies at Wayne State University and the Department of Anthropology at Central Michigan University.