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<p>In my dissertation, "The Kongolese Atlantic: Central African Slavery & Culture
from Mayombe to Haiti," I investigate the cultural history of West Central African
slavery at the height of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the late eighteenth century.
My research focuses on the Loango Coast, a region that has received little scholarly
attention despite the fact that it was responsible for roughly half of slave exports
from West Central Africa at the time. The goal of my dissertation is to understand
how enslaved Kongolese men and women used cultural practices to mediate the experience
of slavery on both sides of the Atlantic world. To do so, I follow captives from their
point of origin in West Central Africa to the Loango Coast and finally to the French
colony of Saint Domingue in order to examine these areas as part of a larger "Kongolese
Atlantic" world. </p><p>My dissertation begins by exploring the social and political
history of the slave trade in the Loango Coast kingdoms, charting the structural changes
that took place as a result of Atlantic trade. Next, I use historical linguistics
to investigate the origins of captives sold on the Loango Coast. I find that the majority
of captives came broadly from the Kongo zone, specifically from the Mayombe rainforest
and Loango Coast kingdoms north of the River Congo. I then use a sociolinguistic methodology
to reconstruct the cultural history of those groups in the near-absence of written
documents. In the last chapter of the dissertation, I follow enslaved Central Africans
from the Loango Coast to Saint Domingue, examining how they used specific and identifiable
north coast cultural practices in the context of slavery. I find enslaved Central
Africans used north coast spiritual tools such as divination, possession, trance,
and power objects to address the material problems of plantation life. Finally, I
argue the persistence of these spiritual practices demonstrates a remarkable durability
of Kongolese ontology on both sides of the Kongolese Atlantic world.</p><p>My research
produces new information about the history of the Loango Coast as well as the colony
of Saint Domingue. The north coast origin of captives which I establish using historical
linguistics contradicts earlier arguments that slaves traded on the Loango Coast originated
from Kingdom of Kongo or from the inland Malebo Pool or Upper River Congo trade. I
show inhabitants of the coastal kingdoms and Mayombe rainforest were not mere middlemen
in the interior slave trade as previously thought, but were the victims of new mechanisms
of enslavement created as a result of the erosion of traditional political institutions
due to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The north coast origin of Loango Coast captives
has repercussions for the cultural history of the Americas. It means that captives
were not "Atlantic Creoles" with prior knowledge of European culture and religion.
I argue historians can only understand the meaning of the cultural practices of Africans
in the Americas by understanding where Africans came from and what cultural and linguistic
tools they brought with them. The use and transmission of Kongolese ritual knowledge
and spiritual technologies in Saint Domingue challenges historians of slavery to move
beyond the false dichotomy that culture originated in either Africa or on the plantation
and forces a fundamental reassessment of the concept of creolization.</p>
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