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

various sources (including novels, court records, and newspapers), the authors discuss, on the one hand, antislavery movements and, on the other hand, how freedmen and freedwomen have dealt with their new status. Because many former slaves—and, in the case of the Caribbean, indentured workers—were born in Africa, they had an ambiguous status that placed them between Africa and the Americas, between slavery and freedom. “New Africans in the Postslavery French West Indies and Guiana, 1854–1889: Close Encounters?” examines the employment of thousands of indentured workers in French West Indies and French Guiana after the French abolition of slavery in 1848. Bought by private merchants, these West Central Africans from the Gabon and Loango-Congo areas were promised freedom in return for a ten-year contract to work in Martinique, Guadeloupe, or French Guiana. Céline Flory explores the various dimensions of the encounters and reciprocal perceptions among the newly arrived Africans and the French colonies’ inhabitants, who were mostly African descendants and former slaves. The study offers new clues for understanding the circulation of West Central African cultures in the Atlantic world as well as for appreciating the social and cultural influences of African presence in French postslavery societie

In chapter 5, “ ‘The Ship of Slavery’: Atlantic Slave Trade Suppression, Liberated Africans, and Black Abolition Politics in Antebellum New York,” Sharla M. Fett discusses how black abolitionists in the late antebellum period fought against the Atlantic slave trade and worked for the liberation of Africans from condemned slave ships as part of their larger vision of Atlantic emancipations. The chapter shows how the illegal slave trade became an important issue through which the Presbyterian minister and former slave James W. C. Pennington and other free African Americans connected local and Atlantic struggles. Fett scrutinizes the ambiguous status of liberated Africans that gave rise to a larger debate on emigration, colonization, and West Indian apprenticeship with reference points all over the Atlantic Basin. By examining Pennington’s speeches and the content of New York newspapers such as the Weekly Anglo-African, Fett’s chapter adds to scholarly understanding of how