Ana Lucia Araujo — Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery with Nemata Blyden

Watch author Ana Lucia Araujo's book talk and reading at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C.

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During the era of the Atlantic slave trade, more than twelve million enslaved Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas in cramped, inhumane conditions. Many of them died on the way, and those who survived had to endure further suffering in the violent conditions that met them onshore. Covering more than three hundred years, Humans in Shackles grapples with this history by foregrounding the lived experience of enslaved people in tracing the long, complex history of slavery in the Americas.

Based on twenty years of research, this book not only serves as a comprehensive history; it also expands that history by providing a truly transnational account that emphasizes the central role of Brazil in the Atlantic slave trade. Additionally, it is deeply informed by African history and shows how African practices and traditions survived and persisted in the Americas among communities of enslaved people. Drawing on primary sources including travel accounts, pamphlets, newspaper articles, slave narratives, and visual sources such as artworks and artifacts, Araujo illuminates the social, cultural, and religious lives of enslaved people working in plantations and urban areas, building families and cultivating affective ties, congregating and re-creating their cultures, and organizing rebellions.

Humans in Shackles puts the lived experiences of enslaved peoples at the center of the story and investigates the heavy impact these atrocities have had on the current wealth disparity of the Americas and rampant anti-Black racism.

Ana Lucia Araujo is professor of history at Howard University in Washington, DC. She is the author or editor of fifteen books, including, most recently, The Gift: How Objects of Prestige Shaped the Atlantic Slave Trade and Colonialism. Her work has appeared in publications including the Washington Post, Slate, and Newsweek.

Araujo is in conversation with Nemata Blyden (M.Phil., Ph.D. Yale University). Blyden is the Armstead Robinson Professor of 19th Century African American History at the Carter G. Woodson Institute, University of Virginia (pending approval of the Board of Visitors). A scholar specializing in African American, African Diaspora, and African history, Nemata Blyden is the author of African Americans and Africa: A New History (Yale University Press, 2019), and West Indians in West Africa, 1808-1880: A diaspora in reverse (University of Rochester Press, 2000). Among her publications are “‘Back to Africa’ The Migration of New World Blacks to Sierra Leone and Liberia”, in Organization of American Historians Magazine of History, Volume 18, Number 3 (April 2004); “The search for Anna Erskine: African American Women in Nineteenth-Century Liberia” in Catherine Higgs, Barbara Moss & Earline Rae Ferguson, Stepping Forward: Black women in Africa and the Americas (Ohio University Press, 2002); “Between Africa and America: Recalibrating Black Americans' Relationship to the Diaspora, with Dr. Jeannette Eileen Jones, Perspectives on History, September 2020, Volume 58, Issue 6; “This na true story of our history”: South Carolina in Sierra Leone's historical memory” in Atlantic Studies: Global Currents, Volume 12, Issue 3, 2015. Her principal thematic interests have included nineteenth century African American history, African and American and Caribbean migrations to Africa and African American engagement with Africa.

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Founded by Carla Cohen and Barbara Meade in 1984, Politics and Prose Bookstore is Washington, D.C.'s premier independent bookstore and cultural hub, a gathering place for people interested in reading and discussing books. Politics and Prose offers superior service, unusual book choices, and a haven for book lovers in the store and online.

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