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.
Author: Edda L. Fields-Black
Publisher: Indiana University Press (Ips)
Published: 09/01/2008
Pages: 296
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.93lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.14w x 0.62d
ISBN13: 9780253016102
ISBN10: 025301610X
BISAC Categories:
- Social Science | Ethnic Studies | American | African American & Black Studies
- History | Africa | West
- Technology & Engineering | History
About the Author
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.