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

interactions through the North American lens. Other authors—such as Paul Gilroy, who made popular the term Black Atlantic—not only ignored Africa and the South Atlantic but also gave little attention to the period of the Atlantic slave trade, privileging the postemancipation era.³ Hence until recently, historical works focusing on the English-speaking world dominated the scholarship of Atlantic history, limiting the examination of collective and individual trajectories to the North Atlantic space.⁴ In the case of slavery studies, this omission led scholars to overlook a myriad of complex and unique experiences lived by millions of enslaved men and women in the Portuguese and Spanish Americas.

Since the 1970s, Africanist scholars have been reassessing the northern-biased concept of Atlantic history. The works of historians such as Walter Rodney, Paul E. Lovejoy, Joseph C. Miller, Robin Law, John K. Thornton, Colin A. Palmer, and more recently Toyin Falola were crucial to conferring on African societies a more accurate place in the Atlantic formation.⁵ Whereas in the past Africa had been envisioned as merely a repository of the enslaved workforce, the new generation of scholars moved away from the focus on demographic data, emphasizing instead the economic and human impacts of the Atlantic slave trade in West and West Central Africa, in coastal areas and the hinterland regions, and considering the participation of African rulers and elites at different levels of the trade in human beings.⁶ The pioneering work of these historians has inspired younger scholars, who in turn have paid greater attention to the experiences of enslaved men, women, and children. As a result, in the last twenty years new scholarship has treated with more importance the particularities of the interactions among Europeans, Africans, and native populations not only in North America and Europe but also in Africa.⁷ By giving attention to the distinct position of Latin America—in particular, Brazil—such studies also emphasize the necessity of moving beyond the comparative perspective in order to understand how exchanges involving both sides of the Atlantic Ocean generated composite zones of complex interactions that gave birth to new religions and identities.⁸ Although some recent works have divided the Atlantic world according to various linguistic areas (British, French, Portuguese,