Atlantic Bonds

In recent decades, historians have deepened our understanding of the Black Atlantic world by exploring the intimate stories of African Americans who left the United States for Africa. While much of this scholarship has fixated on how these migrations shaped African American identity in the United States, Lisa Lindsay’s Atlantic Bonds: A Nineteenth-Century Odyssey from America to Africa focuses more attention on the African side of this story and, in doing so, enriches our understanding of race on both sides of the Atlantic. Lindsay brings her training as an African historian, with a specialization in Nigerian history, to bear on the remarkable life of James Churchwell “Church” Vaughn, a free black man who left the United States in 1853 to live in West Africa until his death in the 1890s. Through the story of Vaughn and his family, Lindsay highlights how African-descended peoples faced both interrelated, yet distinct racial regimes of slavery, segregation, and colonialism throughout the Atlantic World The book helps demystify these “Atlantic bonds” by showing how people throughout the African diaspora navigated white supremacy in ways that were defined by distinct “political and economic structures—and their differences over time and space” (232).

African american · Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Atlantic World · Colonialism · Diaspora · Ethnology · History of Africa · Identity (music) · Middle Passage · Political science · Politics · Race (biology) · Scholarship · Sociology · White (mutation) · White supremacy · African history and culture analysis · Anthropology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Gender Studies · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Law