Africa Table - Writing the Lives of Slaves in Africa and the African Diaspora

Join the Center for African Studies for our weekly lunchtime lecture series.

Speaker: Kristin Mann, Marta Sutton Weeks Fellow, Stanford Humanities Center; Department of History, Emory University

"My talk will reconstruct the lives of a group of Africans enslaved in the Yoruba-speaking region of West Africa in the first half of the nineteenth century. Some of them became slaves in Africa; others were sold into the Atlantic commerce and taken to Brazil. My talk will explore how these women and men were able to maintain contact despite years of separation by the slave trade and eventually reunite in West Africa. The talk will probe the challenges of researching the lives of individual slaves and writing their hidden histories."

Kristin Mann is an historian of Africa with special interests in slavery, the slave trade, abolition, and emancipation; law and colonialism; marriage, gender, and domesticity; the making of the African diaspora; and black Atlantic history and culture. She received her undergraduate and graduate degrees from Stanford University. At the Stanford Humanities Center this year she is writing a book Transatlantic Lives: Slavery and Freedom in West Africa and Brazil. The project pioneers a new approach to the recovery of transatlantic slave biographies, on the cutting edge of studies of slavery, the slave trade, and the African diaspora. The biographies yield powerful new insights into how the many thousands of Yoruba-speaking slaves imported into Brazil in the first half of the nineteenth century forged relationships of different kinds among themselves and with others that helped them endure slavery, find paths to manumission, and create a diaspora that still powerfully connects West Africa, Brazil, and other parts of the Atlantic world.