"The various narratives reveal the issues people of African descent had to confront: war and politics, families and communities, spiritual beliefs and practices, human rights, and, of course, enslavement. The passages break down the assumptions, stereotypes, and overgeneralizations that continue to limit understanding the lives of people of African descent and the ways they imagine their lives. These selections counteract ... Read morethe prevalent myth that Ibero-Atlantic blacks were primarily enslaved on plantations, excluded from exercising free will. Highly recommended."
R. A. Santillan, Medgar Evers College, CUNY, in CHOICE A groundbreaking book . . . provides a broad and rich sampling of documents recording the early modern voices of the African diaspora. . . . Wills, testaments, letters, and historical chronicles are some of the sources that scholars from various disciplines present in this anthology. . . . Each scholar provides a meticulous contextualization of the historical, social, cultural, and political circumstances surrounding the production of each document. The trilingual presentation allows the reader to see the rhetorical style of archival documents in the original language. Additionally, the maps ensure that students have a clear understanding of the geography and historical sites relevant to the range of texts included in the book.
Margaret Olsen, Macalester College Kathryn Mcknight and Leo Garofalo have produced a remarkable book in which the search for historical facts are subsumed by the voices who sought to describe the reality of their times and places. The authors ask the reader “to read these documents as rhetorical and symbolic texts rather than as straightforward sources of historical information. Some students of history or social sciences may find it uncomfortable to move from a search for what ‘really happened’ and what people ‘really believed’ to an examination of how historical actors presented that reality” (p. xviii). This book covers politics and war, families and communities, religious beliefs and practices, and justice. The book brings together a myriad of cultures from Kongo and Ndongo in Central Africa, Puerto Rico, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Panama, Mexico, Spain, and Portugal, among others. Beyond being a mere reader for students, McKnight and Garofalo have created a sourcebook that reveals an entirely different world than what is seen in conventional history books and anthologies. In that sense, this edited volume has broken new ground. Aside from classroom use, this book is highly recommended to librarians, writers, and researchers of colonial Latin America.
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