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

shaped first the trajectories of individuals and groups and then molded their representations through visual arts, literature, and film. Atlantic interactions and slaving paths did not begin with the Middle Passage but rather in the interior of the African continent. The Atlantic slave trade disrupted African social, familial, and kinship ties. These permanent marks left upon various African societies can be understood as a form of collective trauma, expressed through persisting anxiety and insecurity, still visible today in certain social, artistic, and religious practices.²⁰ Along the slaving paths men, women, and children were imprisoned, separated, and raped; they were killed by war, starvation, and disease. As Markus Rediker explained, Africans captured in different regions traveled several days on land and by waterways before reaching the slave ports from which the Middle Passage began. Their paths and their experiences “varied from region to region in Africa, depending on the kind of societies from which both slaves and slave traders came, who the enslaved were, where they came from, and how they got to the slave ship.”²¹

Although the Atlantic slave trade as a global economic enterprise gave birth to the Atlantic world, most chapters in this volume deal with this phenomenon on a much smaller scale, focusing on the lived experiences of the Africans and their descendants—that is, on the lives of those who were the ultimate victims of the trade in human beings. Some chapters also examine the ventures of North Americans who fought against slavery, as well as those historical actors who benefited from the trade by selling and buying enslaved people on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The study of the lives of enslaved Africans and enslaved people of African descent allows us to better understand how these experiences are brought to the present and reinterpreted by the next generations through painting, engravings, and film. Although this book does not neglect the economic exchanges among Europe, Africa, and the Americas, particular attention is given to the movement of groups and individuals and to the cultural, artistic, and religious transfers that derived from the Atlantic slave trade. As a number of the authors represented in this volume contend, the exchanges (and their legacies) that resulted from the movement of peoples, goods, ideas, tastes, and images did not stop with the end