Born in Blackness Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War
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- Taschenbuch
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Form:Einzelkauf Download
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Sprache:Englisch
20,49 €
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Produktdetails
Format
ePUB
Kopierschutz
Nein
Family Sharing
Nein
Text-to-Speech
Ja
Erscheinungsdatum
12.10.2021
Verlag
LiverightSeitenzahl
544 (Printausgabe)
Sprache
Englisch
EAN
9781631495830
Revealing the central yet intentionally obliterated role of Africa in the creation of modernity, Born in Blackness vitally reframes our understanding of world history.
Traditional accounts of the making of the modern world afford a place of primacy to European history. Some credit the fifteenth-century Age of Discovery and the maritime connection it established between West and East; others the accidental unearthing of the New World. Still others point to the development of the scientific method, or the spread of Judeo-Christian beliefs; and so on, ad infinitum. The history of Africa, by contrast, has long been relegated to the remote outskirts of our global story. What if, instead, we put Africa and Africans at the very center of our thinking about the origins of modernity?
In a sweeping narrative spanning more than six centuries, Howard W. French does just that, for Born in Blackness vitally reframes the story of medieval and emerging Africa, demonstrating how the economic ascendancy of Europe, the anchoring of democracy in the West, and the fulfillment of so-called Enlightenment ideals all grew out of Europe's dehumanizing engagement with the dark continent. In fact, French reveals, the first impetus for the Age of Discovery was notas we are so often told, even todayEurope's yearning for ties with Asia, but rather its centuries-old desire to forge a trade in gold with legendarily rich Black societies sequestered away in the heart of West Africa.
Creating a historical narrative that begins with the commencement of commercial relations between Portugal and Africa in the fifteenth century and ends with the onset of World War II, Born in Blackness interweaves precise historical detail with poignant, personal reportage. In so doing, it dramatically retrieves the lives of major African historical figures, from the unimaginably rich medieval emperors who traded with the Near East and beyond, to the Kongo sovereigns who heroically battled seventeenth-century European powers, to the ex-slaves who liberated Haitians from bondage and profoundly altered the course of American history.
While French cogently demonstrates the centrality of Africa to the rise of the modern world, Born in Blackness becomes, at the same time, a far more significant narrative, one that reveals a long-concealed history of trivialization and, more often, elision in depictions of African history throughout the last five hundred years. As French shows, the achievements of sovereign African nations and their now-far-flung peoples have time and again been etiolated and deliberately erased from modern history. As the West ascended, their storiessiloed and piecemealwere swept into secluded corners, thus setting the stage for the hagiographic rise of the West theories that have endured to this day.
Capacious and compelling (Laurent Dubois), Born in Blackness is epic history on the grand scale. In the lofty tradition of bold, revisionist narratives, it reframes the story of gold and tobacco, sugar and cottonand of the greatest commodity of them all, the twelve million people who were brought in chains from Africa to the New World, whose reclaimed lives shed a harsh light on our present world.
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How Africa made the West
Howard French, normally a journalist, but with many ties to the black diaspora around the world, sets out to do something near impossible: to detail the history of how Africa and its people shaped Western history. From the outset of the immensely rich gold-trading nations in Ghana who first awoke interest in Africa by late medieval Europe, French traces the history of "discovery", trade, cultural hybridization, conquest, enslavement, and eventual emancipation. Special care is given to the material motivations and the economic importance of black people to European and later American civilizations, creating a firm link between the evolution of Western capitalism and the increasing exploitation of Africa and it's descendants. Whether you are just starting out your journey into subjects like colonial history or are already adept in one area of black history yet lacking in another, this will give you starting points and link history in new ways you may have not previously considered.
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