Acculturation 9
- Sylviane Diouf, ed., Fighting the Slave Trade: West African
Strategies (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003), xii.
- Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: Uni-
versity of North Carolina Press, 1944).
Acculturation
Acculturation describes the transformative process that
occurs when two or more groups have prolonged contact.
Presumably any cultural/ethnic group can experience ac-
culturation. How this process looks in concrete terms var-
ies as a function of the nature of the intercultural contact
as well as the specifi c cultural elements within each group.
Given the historically oppressive relationship of contact be-
tween African Americans and whites, the defi ning criteria
of acculturation appears to be the degree to which ethnic
and cultural minorities participate in the cultural beliefs,
traditions, and practices of their own culture versus those
of the majority group.
Th ough clearly acculturation was a real phenomenon
experienced by Africans and their descendants through-
out the Western Hemisphere, the search for cultural reten-
tions among enslaved Africans and their descendants has
received a heavy amount of the attention in recent scholarly
work. Scholars across a number of disciplines have been
divided into one of three major interpretive camps: the An-
nihilationist school, the Africanist school, and the Creoliza-
tion school. Robert E. Park, a professor of sociology at the
University of Chicago, was the father of the Annihilation-
ist approach. Writing in 1919, he claimed that slavery had
obliterated African culture and that nothing in the culture of
African Americans living in the U.S. South could be traced
back to African roots. Th e Annihilationist School was later
championed by one of Park’s former students, E. Franklin
Frazier. Frazier contends, in three separate works, that slav-
ery destroyed the black family and this reality facilitated
their Americanization and the complete annihilation of
African culture in the United States. As a black sociologist,
he sought to de-emphasize any nonmainstream elements in
African American culture in order to promote social goals
like integration, black suff rage, and equal rights.
Th e pioneering eff orts of anthropologist Melville J.
Herskovits sought to counter the Annihilationists’ claims.
His 1941 work, Th e Myth of the Negro Past, illuminated
- Esposito, Islam, 317–18.
- Ibid., 320.
- Clements Markham, ed., Th e Journal of Christopher Colum-
bus (New York: Burt Franklin Publisher, 1971 [1893]), 38, 41, 114.
- Ibid., 17.
- Quoted in Mudimbe, Idea, 30.
- See, for example, Paul Gilroy, Th e Black Atlantic: Moder-
nity and Double-Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1993); Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, Th e Many
Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden His-
tory of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000).
- Ira Berlin, Many Th ousands Gone: Th e First Two Centuries
of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of
Harvard University, 1998), 17.
- Ibid., 23.
- John Th ornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the
Atlantic World, 1 400– 1800 , 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1998), 43–47, 53, 55, 57.
- Ibid., 57–66.
- See, for example, Berlin, Many Th ousands Gone; Linebaugh
and Rediker, Many Headed Hydra.
- James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, A Narrative of the
Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw
Gronniosaw, an African Prince, Related by Himself (London: R.
Groombridge, 1840 [1770]), 7–9.
- Berlin, Many Th ousands Gone, 41.
- Ibid., 43.
- Timothy Breen and Stephen Innes, Myne Owne Ground:
Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1 640– 1676 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 43; Berlin, Many Th ousands
Gone, 90; Charles Johnson, ed., Africans in America (New York:
Harcourt Brace, 1998), 44.
- John Johnson’s conviction for fornication with Hannah
Leach would have fallen under this legislation.
- J. D. Fage, “Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Context of
West African History,” Journal of African History 10, no. 3 (1969):
397, 400.
- C. Wrigley, “Historicism in Africa: Slavery and State For-
mation,” African Aff airs 70, no. 279 (April 1971): 113–24, quoted
in Elizabeth Isichei, A History of Nigeria (London: Longman,
1983), 107.
- Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Wash-
ington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974).
- Walter Rucker, “Th e African and European Slave Trades,”
in Alton Hornsby Jr., A Companion to African American History
(Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 51.
- Th ornton, Africa and Africans, 125.
- Robin Law, “Africa and Africans in the Making of the At-
lantic World,” Th e International Journal of African Historical Stud-
ies 26, no. 1 (1993): 192.
- Louis Jadin and Mireille Dicorato, Correspondance de Dom
Afonso; Roi du Congo, 1 506- 1543 (Bruxelles: Acadé mie Royale des
Sciences d’outre-mer, 1974), 156.
- Joseph Miller, “Central Africa during the Era of the Slave
Trade, c. 1490s-1850s,” in Central Africans and Cultural Trans-
formations in the American Diaspora, ed. Linda Heywood (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 28, 34.
- Elizabeth Allo Isichei, A History of Nigeria (London: Long-
man, 1983), 108; Walter Rodney, A History of the Upper Guinea
Coast (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 144.
