ABSTRACT
African slaves and their masters and mistresses created new cultures in the Americas out of the ordeal of Atlantic slavery. The cumulative effects of the slave labor system served to radically change people’s perceptions of their own culture, and their own self. Prior to 1450, few people in Europe, the Americas, or Africa would have defined themselves as white or black. Yet, after the development of slavery in the Americas, racial categories became the primary method of self-identifying and identifying others. This cultural phenomenon became common even in areas that did not experience large-scale plantation slavery. The greatest cultural legacy of slavery in the Americas, and its most unique feature, was not brutalizing labor conditions, but how slavery shaped notions of blackness and whiteness and shaped understandings of racial identity in the New World. Analyzing “slave culture” is difficult. Cultures are dynamic and constantly changing.
Defining a specific culture often freezes cultural forms at a specific and static moment. In order to avoid this problem, I place considerable emphasis on how Africans struggled to survive slavery while creatively drawing from their own African-derived cultural resources and stressing how diverse cultures were recreated and reformulated on the other side of the Atlantic. Let me be clear about what I mean by “culture”. In 1983, Raymond Williams
famously wrote, “culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language” (Williams, 1983: 87). More than 25 years later, the latest historical literature about slave culture only confirms Williams’s statement. William Sewell offers a methodological overview of how historians have used the concept of culture, stressing that it is most frequently used as an abstracted part of social existence:
