Becoming African in America
Subtitle: race and nation in the early Black Atlantic
By: James Sidbury.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2007
Place of publication: New York, NY
Language: eng
Number of pages: 291
ISBN-13: 9780195320107
Description: "In Becoming African in America, James Sidbury reveals how an African identity emerged in the late eighteenth-century Atlantic world, tracing the development of "African" from a degrading term connoting savage people to a word that was a source of pride and unity for the diverse victims of the Atlantic slave trade." "Sidbury examines the work of black writers - such as Ignatius Sancho in England and Phillis Wheatley in America - who created a narrative of African identity that took its meaning from the diaspora, a narrative that began with enslavement and the experience of the Middle Passage, allowing people of various ethnic backgrounds to become "African" by virtue of sharing the oppression of slavery."--Jacket.