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

FAIN: FS-50208-08

Virginia Foundation for the Humanities (Charlottesville, VA 22903-4625)
Joseph Miller (Project Director: March 2008 to March 2010)

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

The 2009 version of ROOTS updates successful Seminars (2003, 2005, 2007) to enable original scholarly research on trans-Atlantic relationships 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 eventual enslavement for those taken across the ocean; and the human meanings and memories of Africa among the survivors in the Americas. The 15 participants will integrate these humanistic perspectives, and the most current work on Africa and African-Americans, into research projects of their own during the seminar in Charlottesville VA. Planned outcomes focus on the production of original scholarship that will lead the current academic movement in all disciplines toward trans-regional integration and facilitate teaching in American classrooms in those forward-looking terms.