Roots: African Dimensions of the History and Cultures of the Americas (Through the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade)

FAIN: FS-50116-06

Virginia Foundation for the Humanities (Charlottesville, VA 22903-4625)
Joseph C. Miller (Project Director: March 2006 to October 2008)

A six-week seminar for fifteen college and university teachers on Africa and the trans-Atlantic slave trade before c.1800.

The 2007 version of ROOTS updates very successful previous seminars, to enable original scholarly research on trans-Atlantic relations involving Africans in the 16th-18th centuries (the "era of the Atlantic slave trade"). It focuses on the human strategies of engaging Atlantic commercial impulses in Africa, the human experiences of uprooting, isolation, and the eventual enslavement for those taken across the ocean, and the human meanings and memories of Africa among the survivors in the Americas. The director and visiting experts will guide 15 participants in integrating these humanistic perspectives, and the most current work on both Africa and the African American, into their own research projects during the seminar in Charlottesville VA. Planned outcomes focus on the production of original scholarship that will lead the current academic movement toward trans-regional integration and facilitate teaching in those forward-looking terms in American classrooms.