Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora

Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora
ISBN-10
0253352193
ISBN-13
9780253352194
Series
Deep Roots
Category
Social Science / Ethnic Studies / American / African American & Black Studies
Pages
277
Language
English
Published
2008
Publisher
Indiana University Press
Author
Edda L. Fields-Black

Description

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.

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