African Musicians in the Atlantic World

Mary Caton Lingold is Assistant Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Introduction 1. Musical Encounters in Early Modern Atlantic Africa 2. Circulating African Musical Knowledge to the Americas: Macow's Xylophone 3. Plantation Gatherings and the Foundation of Black American Music 4. Race and Professional Musicianship in the Early Caribbean: In Search of Mr. Baptiste 5. African Traditions and the Evolution of Caribbean Festival Culture in the 18th Century 6. Songs from the 1770s: A Musical Moment Epilogue: Listening for Tena

Her close reading reconstructs the multisensory sound, vibration, dance, and ritual that shaped nearly every sphere of life for Africans and their descendants on both sides of the Atlantic. Limited sources still contain brilliant detail of what Africans created under slavery. . . By reading familiar sources alongside this new archive, Lingold expands our knowledge of African and Afro- creativity under enslavement and adds to the argument that enslaved people and their culture did indeed survive slavery.-- "Public Books" Mary Caton Lingold has given us a deeply researched and fascinating narrative about the very beginnings of the musicking of Africans in the Atlantic world. Focusing mainly on the anglophone Caribbean, and the American South, but also West and West Central Africa, the book opens with vivid records of performance in Atlantic Africa before shifting to track the evolution of musical life on US plantations in the 17th and 18th centuries. The greatest strength of this book lies in Lingold's depiction of the sonic experiences of enslaved Africans as they entertained within their own communities. This is real folks' history, richly told from the perspective of what Fred Moten calls the undercommons. With a keen ear toward the hidden transcripts embedded within the strata of history, Lingold draws extensively on European travel accounts, as well as the letters of settlers, traders, colonial officials and missionaries. This is a landmark effort which is sure to spark further interest in a fascinating period in the evolution of the musical culture of the Black Atlantic. Highly recommended. --Corey Harris, award-winning musician A rich, well-written and well-researched book on a novel and important topic. African Musicians in the Atlantic World will make a major contribution to multiple fields, including music history, Atlantic studies, colonial Caribbean history and literature, as well as studies of transatlantic slavery, the African diaspora, and Black culture in the Americas. It is full of fascinating archival discoveries and insights. --Lisa Voigt, Yale University, author of Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic: Circulations of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds