The Long African Atlantic

This paper argues that we can’t understand the history of Africans in the Atlantic world without understanding the preceding millennia-long history of diaspora on the continent. That diaspora produced a linguistic context which serves as a new archive for the history of Africans in the Atlantic world—an archive offering unparalleled access to the ideas of the vast majority enslaved men and women whose thoughts were never recorded in court documents or autobiographies. The larger project uses case studies from colonial Brazil, Saint Domingue, and Cuba to explore the ways in which linguistic processes and languages’ unique phonological, grammatical, and morphological qualities offer new insights into the histories of enslavement, marronage, wealth, ethnogenesis, and slavery in the Atlantic World. This paper will offer one case study to illustrate the connection between the long history of diaspora in the African continent and its implications for the history of enslavement in the Atlantic world. Approaching language as both a method of analysis and an archive speaks back to the silences of the colonial archive, offering historians and, more significantly, the descendants of the men and women whose history we seek the opportunity to recognize the experiences and the contributions to the modern world of the silenced. Essential to broadening our understanding is broadening our disciplinary training. The paper closes with a few question for our discipline and its professional associations about the possibilities for cross-training in other disciplines.