Mangrove rice farming on West Africa's Rice Coast was the mirror image of tidewater rice plantations worked by enslaved Africans in 18th-century South Carolina and Georgia. This book reconstructs the development of rice-growing technology among the Baga and Nalu of coastal Guinea, beginning more than a millennium before the transatlantic slave trade. It reveals a picture of dynamic pre-colonial coastal societies, quite unlike the static, homogenous pre-modern Africa of previous scholarship. From its examination of inheritance, innovation, and borrowing, Deep Roots fashions a theory of cultural change that encompasses the diversity of communities, cultures, and forms of expression in Africa and the African diaspora.
Edda L. Fields-Black is an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University, specializing in pre-colonial and West African history. With research interests extending into the African diaspora, for more than 15 years Fields-Black has traveled to and lived in Guinea, Sierra Leone, South Carolina, and Georgia to uncover the history of African rice farmers and rice cultures.
Table of Contents
List of TablesOrthography
Introduction1. The Rio Nunez Region: A Small Corner of West Africa's Rice Coast Region2. The First-Comers and the Roots of Coastal Rice-growing Technology3. The Newcomers and the Seeds of Tidal Rice-Growing Technology4. Coastal Collaboration and Specialization: Flowering of Tidal Rice-Growing Technologies5. The Strangers and the Branches of Coastal Rice-growing Technology, c.1500 to 18006. Feeding the Slave Trade: The Trade in Rice and Captives from West Africa's Rice CoastConclusion
Appendix I.1 Fieldwork InterviewsAppendix I.2 Rice Terminology in Atlantic Languages Spoken in the Coastal Rio Nunez RegionNotesBibliographyIndex
What People are Saying About This
"An imaginative book . . . The writing is good and the ideas important."
Judith Carney]]>
An imaginative book . . . The writing is good and the ideas important.
C. L. Goucher]]>
Fields-Black (history, Carnegie-Mellon Univ.) digs out key periods in the technological history of West Africa's coastal littoral by focusing on historical linguistics and tracing environmentally specific knowledge and its use in tidewater rice farming. Despite the potentially esoteric focus on the precolonial (first millennium) history of a sub-region of West Africa and the use of specialist methodologies, Fields-Black manages to make her research and its implications accessible to a wider audience. The volume's final chapter on the African diaspora is a bridge between precolonial coastal Africa and the technology of the American South in the slave trade era explored by Judith Carney in Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (CH, Oct'01, 39-0928). Readers will appreciate the book's clarity of expression and revealing discussions of historical analysis and argumentation. The author's interdisciplinary and comparative approaches challenge archaeological theories of diffusion from the inland Niger Delta to the 'rice coast' and sharpen the understanding of technology transfer and dynamic cultural change in the Atlantic era. Summing Up: Recommended. Research and classroom use at undergraduate and graduate levels. — Choice
Judith Carney
An imaginative book . . . The writing is good and the ideas important.
Northwestern University - LaRay Denzer
Fields-Black . . . offers important new insights into West African agricultural history and the dynamics of diasporic connections.
C. L. Goucher
Fields-Black (history, Carnegie-Mellon Univ.) digs out key periods in the technological history of West Africa's coastal littoral by focusing on historical linguistics and tracing environmentally specific knowledge and its use in tidewater rice farming. Despite the potentially esoteric focus on the precolonial (first millennium) history of a sub-region of West Africa and the use of specialist methodologies, Fields-Black manages to make her research and its implications accessible to a wider audience. The volume's final chapter on the African diaspora is a bridge between precolonial coastal Africa and the technology of the American South in the slave trade era explored by Judith Carney in Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (CH, Oct'01, 39-0928). Readers will appreciate the book's clarity of expression and revealing discussions of historical analysis and argumentation. The author's interdisciplinary and comparative approaches challenge archaeological theories of diffusion from the inland Niger Delta to the 'rice coast' and sharpen the understanding of technology transfer and dynamic cultural change in the Atlantic era. Summing Up: Recommended. Research and classroom use at undergraduate and graduate levels. — Choice
