Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787-2005

by James T. Campbell, David Levering Lewis (Preface by)

Overview

Penguin announces a prestigious new series under presiding editor Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

Many works of history deal with the journeys of blacks in bondage from Africa to the United States along the "middle passage," but there is also a rich and little examined history of African Americans traveling in the opposite direction. In Middle Passages, award-winning historian James T. Campbell vividly recounts more than two centuries of African American journeys to Africa, including the experiences of such extraordinary figures as Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, Richard Wright, Malcolm X, and Maya Angelou. A truly groundbreaking work, Middle Passages offers a unique perspective on African Americans' ever-evolving relationship with their ancestral homeland, as well as their complex, often painful relationship with the United States.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780143111986
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/24/2007
Series:	Penguin History of American Life Series
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	560
Sales rank:	975,043
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

James T. Campbell, PhD, is professor of United States history and the Edgar E. Robinson Professor in United States history at Stanford University. Dr. Campbell earned his BA from Yale University and both his MA and PhD from Stanford University. He is the author of Race, Nation, and Empire in American History and Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787–2005.

David Levering Lewis is the author of God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570–1215; W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919; W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963; and more. Lewis’s work can be characterized as comparative history with interests in biography, civil rights, Europe and empire, and cultural politics. He is professor of history at New York University.

Table of Contents

Preface   David Levering Lewis     ix
Introduction: What Is Africa to Me?     xix
Prologue: Ayuba's Journey     1
Windward Coast     15
Representing the Race     57
Emigration or Extermination     99
Mundele Ndom     136
So Long, So Far Away     188
The Spell of Africa     226
Native Son, American Daughter     268
Black Star     315
Counting the Bodies     365
Epilogue: The Language We Cry In     405
Notes     441
Bibliographic Essay     475
Index     491

Editorial Reviews

Campbell is a master storyteller who engages the reader in the human drama of American blacks confronting cultural realities that do not always square with the myths of an imagined native land. . . . Campbell provides an artful reconstruction of the often bittersweet experience of return and reunion. (The New York Times Book Review)

From the Publisher

Campbell is a master storyteller who engages the reader in the human drama of American blacks confronting cultural realities that do not always square with the myths of an imagined native land.... Campbell provides an artful reconstruction of the often bittersweet experience of return and reunion.

The New York Times Book Review

Reversing middle passage from Africans' forced transatlantic voyages as slaves to African Americans' voluntary journeys back to Africa, the prize-winning Campbell (American civilization, Africana studies & history, Brown Univ.; Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa) explores spiritual, political, psychological, and emotional dimensions of 220 years of blacks' reconnections with their ancestral homeland. Campbell shows how internal personal and group identities imprinted these itineraries even as the journeys demanded jettisoning preconceptions for black Americans in order to reimagine themselves and their kindred African blacks. His 12 chapters focus on the push and pull of the "Dark Continent" on leading African Americans, past and present, whose reflections illuminate answers to two intertwined questions central to African American history: What is Africa to me? What is America to me? Sweeping in scope, rich in detail, and pointed with insights, Campbell's tour de force offers much to ponder about the African American past and present. Essential for collections on African American history, literature, and culture, the Atlantic world, the black diaspora, Pan Africanism, or what might be called black globalization. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 12/05.]-Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Campbell (History/Brown Univ.) assembles a fine look at various homecomings to a continent that was not often welcoming, for many of the stolen sons and daughters of Africa returned to find that they were now truly "American."Some, like Richard Pryor, joked about it, while others, such as Eddie Harris and Maya Angelou, found the situation disturbing. The first great travelers presented here are fascinating characters nearly lost to history: the Muslim nobleman Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, ransomed from slavery in Maryland by sympathetic Londoners in 1733 and returned to Gambia (where, ironically, he became a slaver); the musician Newport Gardner, author of "the first compositions published by a black person in American history," who finally returned to Africa from Rhode Island as an old man, having tried for years to make the crossing. Campbell sets forth that leaders such as Thomas Jefferson encouraged such homecomings, inasmuch as they meant that blacks would leave America; he even made inquiries about whether the British government would accept black Americans in the new colony of Sierra Leone. Many African-Americans did travel to West Africa in resettlement schemes, and many died en route, while "many of those that survived immediately began searching for ways to return to the United States." So it was with author Richard Wright, who traveled to Ghana to witness independence and was terribly alienated by the corruption he found, and Era Bell Thompson, whose Egyptian experiences led her to "thank God for the Stars and Stripes." Yet others, such as W.E.B. DuBois, found that they liked being among the privileged elite. In the end, Campbell observes, there are as many kinds of homecomings asthere are travelers. A well-conceived and solidly written perspective on the African diaspora.

Kirkus Reviews