Introduction
1: Mobile and the Slave Trades
2: West African Origins
3: Ouidah
4: Arrival in Mobile
5: Slavery
6: Freedom
7: African Town
8: Between Two Worlds
9: Going Back Home
Epilogue
An Essay on Sources
The Illegal Slave Trade in Numbers
Bibliography
Sylviane A. Diouf is an award-winning author of books on African and African diaspora history and culture. She has taught at Libreville University and New York University and is currently a curator at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York.
"An exceedingly well and creatively researched study that greatly
contributes to the fields of slavery and African American
history."--H-Net
"This important contribution provides readers with the opportunity
to consider African culture, its survival even under slavery, its
sense of community with roots in West Africa, and the difficulties
of maintaining community in a segregated and increasingly Jim Crow
South in the late 19th century. Highly recommended."--T.F.
Armstrong, CHOICE
"A compelling and often tragic narrative of survival and
adaptation. It makes it clear that the Atlantic slave trade was not
only a part of a 'distant' history of the United States, but that
it also continued to shape our country long after it was officially
abolished two centuries ago."--Lisa A. Lindsay, African Studies
Review
"Diouf's book makes a significant contribution to the history of
race and identity in Alabama and the Atlantic world."--Timothy R.
Buckner, The Journal of Southern History
"Extremely well-documented work that breathes life into the African
Diaspora."--Debra Newman Ham, The Journal of African American
History
"Dreams of Africa in Alabama is more than a gripping slave story.
Few historians have succeeded to the extent that Diouf has in
presenting a fully fleshed picture of the experience of Africans
negotiating life in America...A valuable and impressive addition to
the literature of slavery and emancipation in American
history."--Donna L. Cox, Southern Historian
"Diouf's masterful storytelling, thorough research, and deft
handling of the body of sometimes-conflicting sources bring the
story to light and effectively set the record straight."--Journal
of American History
"A major contribution to pan-African and Black trans-Atlantic
studies...Dreams of Africa in Alabama reads as a novel, yet it is
the product of rigorous research..."--Sylvie Kande, QBR: The Black
Book Review
"Diouf immerses the reader in the diversity and complexity of
Africa...The narrative is patient, disciplined, compelling, and
brave, never shying away from the central role that Africans played
in the enslavement of other Africans...One puts down this
compelling book convinced both of the significance of the Africans
at the center of it, and that Diouf has given us a superb
history."--Eric Love, Civil War Book Review
"This remarkable story of how a group of captured Africans were
torn from their native land in the kingdom of Dahomey, transported
across the Atlantic Ocean to Mobile, Alabama shortly before the
Civil War, and struggled to recapture their former lives by
creating an African town during the postwar era, offers a unique
perspective on American history. The narrative is at once tragic,
uplifting, and engrossing."--Loren Schweninger, co-author of In
Search of
the Promised Land: A Slave Family in the Old South
"An amazing story! Diouf shows how the African captives on the last
American slave ship not only survived slavery, the civil war, and
reconstruction in Alabama, but also fought to preserve African
memories, culture, and community. The exhaustive research and
graceful writing of Sylviane Diouf has brought this epic journey to
life."--Robert Harms, author of The Diligent: A Voyage through the
Worlds of the Slave Trade
"In a tale worthy of a novelist, Sylviane Diouf provides a
well-researched, nicely written, and moving account of the last
slave ship to America, whose 110 captives arrived in Mobile in 1860
and, after the war, created their dream of Africa in Alabama and
called it Africa Town."--Howard Jones, author of Mutiny on the
Amistad
"Without question, this is the richest narration of the history of
the last set of African slaves who came to the United States. The
book carefully illustrates how they they were able to construct a
semi-independent existence, navigating the treacherous experience
of bondage during the Civil War years and of the constricted
freedom that followed. Not only do we gain access to precious,
invaluable details about how the marginalized made their own
history, we
receive additional profound knowledge of the process through which
African practices were retained."--Toyin Falola, University of
Texas, and Fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Letters
"Dreams of Africa in Alabama is an excellent example of the new
scholarship on the African diaspora that reconstructs the
individual life stories of enslaved Africans--in this case the
people brought from West Africa to Alabama in 1860 on the Clotilda.
Diouf has sensitively revealed how these people built on their
shared misfortune in being enslaved to form the vibrant community
of African Town in the midst of an increasingly racist society,
a
testimony to unshakeable memories of their African
homelands."--Paul E. Lovejoy, Harriet Tubman Research Institute,
York University
"Dreams of Africa in Alabama stands as a moving memorial to the
indomitable spirit of a small group of Africans who managed to
maintain their dignity and their humanity on an unfamiliar and
often hostile shore."--Mobile Press-Register
"Dreams of Africa in Alabama is more than a gripping slave story.
Few historians have succeeded to the extent that Diouf has in
presenting a fully fleshed picture of the experience of Africans
negotiating life in America...A valuable and impressive addition to
the literature of slavery and emancipation in American
history."--Donna L. Cox, Southern Historian
"Dreams of Africa in Alabama is an extraordinarily well-written
historical account...where the reader will find horror, sorrow and
courage, coupled with a sensational resilience to the harsh
conditions which the African slaves endured."--The Northern
Mariner
"One of the most illuminating aspects of Dioug's study is her
elucidation of the Clotilda Africans' often troubled relationships
with African-Americans."--Journal of Social History
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