Paths of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Interactions, Identities, and ...

and Malagasy identities and groups. Wendy Wilson-Fall’s provocative chapter shows that along their journeys across the Atlantic Ocean, Africans spread ideas and icons, and among these—quite possibly—were the icons of the signare and zany malatta. Wilson-Fall’s chapter helps readers understand the role of signares and zany malatta in the Senegambian and Malagasian spaces and encourages reconsideration of the place of in-between women within and beyond the Atlantic worl

The fourth and final section of the book, Paths of Representations, examines the ways images depicting enslaved men and women—as well as those depicting African Americans more generally—have contributed to the development and renewal of the plural memories of slavery and its legacies in the Atlantic world. Whereas the analysis of the multiple representations of slavery (and its connections with the colonial past) in West African, French, and North American films lead us to question and redefine a Black Atlantic aesthetic, the study of North American paintings of the end of the nineteenth century allows us to measure the cultural impact of the Afro-Atlantic slave past in North American memory. Past and present representations of slavery in engravings, sculptures, paintings, monuments, and movies contribute to building a particular image of enslaved men and women. These images of victimhood, resistance, and agency contribute to reshaping the Atlantic slave past in the present.

In chapter 10, Peter H. Wood analyzes a famous 1899 painting by North American artist Winslow Homer that has been housed for more than a century in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Wood reexamines The Gulf Stream in terms of Homer’s career, and the chapter seeks to look beneath the surface of this renowned oil painting in order to see the wider implications of its central features. Homer’s masterpiece is set in the Atlantic between Cuba and North America, with a distant ship and an ominous storm in the background. A solitary black man, adrift on a small boat, is surrounded by sharks—a powerful visual echo of the Middle Passage. Beside him are stalks of sugarcane, the plant whose profitability led to the rise of the Atlantic slave trade in the Americas. Wood’s chapter reveals the complex resonances of this important image,