Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora (Blacks in the Diaspora)

By Edda L. Fields-black and Edda L. Fields-Black

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0253352193
• ISBN13: 9780253352194
• Release Date: October 2008
• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Length: 296 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 1.1" x 6.1"