Seeds of Survival and Celebration: Plants and the Black Experience: Black/African Ethnobotany

This book provides the first comprehensive examination of ethnobotanical knowledge and skills among the African Diaspora in the Americas. Leading scholars on the subject explore the complex relationship between plant use and meaning among the descendants of Africans in the New World. With the aid of archival and field research carried out in North America, South America, and the Caribbean, contributors explore the historical, environmental, and political-ecological factors that facilitated/hindered transatlantic ethnobotanical diffusion; the role of Africans as active agents of plant and plant knowledge transfer during the period of plantation slavery in the Americas; the significance of cultural resistance in refining and redefining plant-based traditions; the principal categories of plant use that resulted; the exchange of knowledge among Amerindian, European and other African peoples; and the changing significance of African-American ethnobotanical traditions in the 21st century.

The transatlantic slave trade forced millions of Africans into bondage. Until the early nineteenth century, African slaves came to the Americas in greater numbers than Europeans. In the Shadow of Slavery provides a startling new assessment of the Atlantic slave trade and upends conventional wisdom by shifting attention from the crops slaves were forced to produce to the foods they planted for their own nourishment. Many familiar foods--millet, sorghum, coffee, okra, watermelon, and the "Asian" long bean, for example--are native to Africa, while commercial products such as Coca Cola, Worcestershire Sauce, and Palmolive Soap rely on African plants that were brought to the Americas on slave ships as provisions, medicines, cordage, and bedding. In this exciting, original, and groundbreaking book, Judith A. Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff draw on archaeological records, oral histories, and the accounts of slave ship captains to show how slaves' food plots--"botanical gardens of the dispossessed"--became the incubators of African survival in the Americas and Africanized the foodways of plantation societies.

Preface: Since the abolition of slavery in America in 1865...tremendous attempts have been made by Black Americans to spell out in great detail the contributions they have made in music (particularly spirituals, blues , and jazz) in art, and in history to enhance the quality of life in America. Many of their contributions have admittedly fallen into underserved oblivion...But among the contributions that have been least publicized were those that concern the plants brought to the Americas by Black Slaves from the Old World or those native American plants that they adapted for their use and made popular.