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Deep Roots Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African DiasporaEdda L. Fields-Black |
Also available as an e-book on the IUPO site. Click here
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The ancient rice-growing cultures of West Africa and their transplantation to the Georgia-Carolina coast "An imaginative book . . . The writing is good and the ideas important." —Judith Carney, author of Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas
"Fields-Black . . . offers important new insights into West African agricultural history and the dynamics of diasporic connections." —LaRay Denzer, Northwestern University
"While Deep Roots is a scholarly endeavor anyone interested in South Carolina’s rice history or African history would find it both fascinating and full of interesting facts, stories, illustrations and graphs that bring the story to life." —Community Times Dispatch (Walterboro, SC) , February 18, 2009
"This study is an excellent contribution to the growing literature on food in precolonial Africa. . . . it is a trailblazing work in its innovative amalgamation of archaeological, linguistic, and written source materials." —Jeremy Rich, Middle Tennessee State University, Vol. 42.2 2009 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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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.
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Distribution: World Publication date: 9/29/2008 Format: cloth 296 pages, 20 b&w photos, 5 maps, 6.125 x 9.25 ISBN-13: 978-0-253-35219-4
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