Panel discussion

Between 1500 and 1820, more than three out of every four immigrants to the Americas was African.  Unfortunately, most scholars of the Atlantic still do not take Africa as seriously as they should.  As part of this panel, I will point to conceptual and methodological interventions that illuminate the African contribution to the history of the Iberian Atlantic world.  By viewing the Iberian Atlantic through an African lens, we might reconfigure our understandings of Iberian, Atlantic, and African histories.  For example, how would Atlantic history look if we more strongly emphasized Iberian and African interactions in the “Eastern Atlantic” in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries?  How exceptional is the story of American exploration when juxtaposed against similar Iberian forays into the Canary Islands, Cape Verde, São Tomé, and West Africa?  Once on the American side of the Atlantic, to what extent do “creolization” approaches privilege “Westernization” and “Americanization”?  How exceptional was the American “miracle of creolization” when examined from various African perspectives, where processes of social and cultural integration were the norm, both before and after the arrival of Europeans?  Should we assume that the polyglot  peoples who left Luanda and Ouidah became “Angola” and “Mina” because they were becoming more “American,” or because they rendered these categories meaningful through broadly shared histories, lingua francas, religious beliefs, and so on?  Finally, I will highlight a range of primary and documentary sources that suggest new avenues and new questions that might be raised of the “entangled” histories of Africans, Americans, and Iberians.  By examining these sources through the lens of the African past, as opposed to the lens of American “beginnings,” we can see how even a reading of “traditional” Iberian sources might reveal something more African, and ultimately, more Atlantic.