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Major literary figure and “master of language” (The New York Times) John Edgar Wideman uses his unique generational perspective to explore what he calls the “slaveroad,” a daunting, haunting reality that runs throughout American history. John Edgar Wideman’s “slaveroad” is a palimpsest of physical, social, and psychological terrain, the great expanse to which he writes in this groundbreaking work that unsettles the boundaries of memoir, history, and fiction. The slaveroad begins with the Atlantic Ocean, across which enslaved Africans were carried, but the term comes to encompass the journeys and experiences of Black Americans since then and the many insidious ways that slavery separates, wounds, and persists. In a section of “Slaveroad,” called “Sheppard”, William Henry Sheppard, a descendant of enslaved Virginians, travels back to Africa where he works as a missionary, converting Africans to Christianity alongside his Southern white colleague. Wideman imagines drinking afternoon tea with Lucy Gant Sheppard, William’s wife, who was on her own slaveroad, as she experienced her husband’s adultery with the African women he was trying to convert. In “Penn Station,” Wideman’s brother, after being confined forty-four years in prison, travels from Pittsburgh to New York. As Wideman awaits his brother, he asks, “How will I distinguish my brother from the dead. Dead passengers on the slaveroad.” An impassioned, searching work, Slaveroad is one man’s reckoning with a uniquely American lineage and the ways that the past haunts the present: “It’s here. Now. Where we are. What we are. A story compounded of stories told, retold, untold, not told.”
This compelling text sheds light on the important but under studied trans-Saharan slave trade. The author uncovers and surveys this, the least-noticed of the slave trades out of Africa, which from the seventh to the twentieth centuries quielty delievered almost as many black Africans into foreign servitude as did the far busier, but much briefer Atlantic and East African trades. Illuminating for the first time a significant, but ignored subject, the book supports and widens current scholarly examination of Africans' essential role in the enslavement of fellow-Africans and their delivery to internal, Atlantic or trans-Saharan markets.
The “enlightening” (The Guardian) true story of the last ship to carry enslaved people to America, the remarkable town its survivors’ founded after emancipation, and the complicated legacy their descendants carry with them to this day—by the journalist who discovered the ship’s remains. Fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed, the Clotilda became the last ship in history to bring enslaved Africans to the United States. The ship was scuttled and burned on arrival to hide the wealthy perpetrators to escape prosecution. Despite numerous efforts to find the sunken wreck, Clotilda remained hidden for the next 160 years. But in 2019, journalist Ben Raines made international news when he successfully concluded his obsessive quest through the swamps of Alabama to uncover one of our nation’s most important historical artifacts. Traveling from Alabama to the ancient African kingdom of Dahomey in modern-day Benin, Raines recounts the ship’s perilous journey, the story of its rediscovery, and its complex legacy. Against all odds, Africatown, the Alabama community founded by the captives of the Clotilda, prospered in the Jim Crow South. Zora Neale Hurston visited in 1927 to interview Cudjo Lewis, telling the story of his enslavement in the New York Times bestseller Barracoon. And yet the haunting memory of bondage has been passed on through generations. Clotilda is a ghost haunting three communities—the descendants of those transported into slavery, the descendants of their fellow Africans who sold them, and the descendants of their fellow American enslavers. This connection binds these groups together to this day. At the turn of the century, descendants of the captain who financed the Clotilda’s journey lived nearby—where, as significant players in the local real estate market, they disenfranchised and impoverished residents of Africatown. From these parallel stories emerges a profound depiction of America as it struggles to grapple with the traumatic past of slavery and the ways in which racial oppression continues to this day. And yet, at its heart, The Last Slave Ship remains optimistic—an epic tale of one community’s triumphs over great adversity and a celebration of the power of human curiosity to uncover the truth about our past and heal its wounds.
Shares the stories of Wallace Turnage and John Washington, former slaves who, in the midst of chaos during the Civil War, escaped to the North and lived to tell about their experiences.
During the 1940s, in response to the charge that his writing was filled with violence, Richard Wright replied that the manner came from the matter, that the “relationship of the American Negro to the American scene [was] essentially violent,” and that he could deny neither the violence he had witnessed nor his own existence as a product of racial violence. Abdul R. JanMohamed provides extraordinary insight into Wright’s position in this first study to explain the fundamental ideological and political functions of the threat of lynching in Wright’s work and thought. JanMohamed argues that Wright’s oeuvre is a systematic and thorough investigation of what he calls the death-bound-subject, the subject who is formed from infancy onward by the imminent threat of death. He shows that with each successive work, Wright delved further into the question of how living under a constant menace of physical violence affected his protagonists and how they might “free” themselves by overcoming their fear of death and redeploying death as the ground for their struggle. Drawing on psychoanalytic, Marxist, and phenomenological analyses, and on Orlando Patterson’s notion of social death, JanMohamed develops comprehensive, insightful, and original close readings of Wright’s major publications: his short-story collection Uncle Tom’s Children; his novels Native Son, The Outsider, Savage Holiday, and The Long Dream; and his autobiography Black Boy/American Hunger. The Death-Bound-Subject is a stunning reevaluation of the work of a major twentieth-century American writer, but it is also much more. In demonstrating how deeply the threat of death is involved in the formation of black subjectivity, JanMohamed develops a methodology for understanding the presence of the death-bound-subject in African American literature and culture from the earliest slave narratives forward.
Since Bradt first published a guide to Benin over 10 years ago, the country has become more popular with visitors to West Africa. Bradt's Benin remains the original and one of the only comprehensive guides in English to this French-speaking country, arguably the region's best wildlife destination and the birthplace of the much maligned and little understood religion of Vodou (voodoo). This new edition includes coverage of the growing range of eco-travel and community based tourism options that have sprung up in recent years. Also included is more information on the wildlife and national parks of the north which are becoming more popular with general safari tourists, including the Parc National de la Pendjari (now under African Parks Management), increasingly recognised as the closest place to Europe easily to see lions and elephants. A dedicated chapter on Cotonou ensures the capital is covered in full detail, including up-to-date recommendations for places to eat and stay, while the rest of the country is divided into five easy-to-follow chapters, each replete with listings, hotels and restaurants, background and historical text, as well as recommendations on what to see and entertainment. Bradt's Benin also includes a field guide to gods, ghosts and dead people: after all, it's easy here to arrange to have a cup of tea with a wizard and buy spells to make someone love you. And what makes Benin so special from a visitor's perspective is that such characters are a visible part of day-to-day life and encounters with them may well form the backbone of a Benin adventure. But there is more than just storybook magic to this country. It has a huge and varied array of birdlife and two of the finest parks this side of the continent and it is a place in which heart-in-the-mouth encounters with buffalo, elephant and lion are day-to-day events. Whatever your interest, whether it's wildlife, culture, golden sand beaches or tracing your ancestral roots, Bradt's Benin offers comprehensive and extensive travel information for all price bands and is the perfect companion for a successful visit.