Herman L. Bennett (born 1964) is an American scholar who specializes in American and Africana studies particularly the African diaspora and Latin America. [1] He is the author of three academic monographs.
Bennett received his Ph.D. from Duke University. [2] Bennett has taught at UNC-Chapel Hill, Johns Hopkins, Rutgers, and the Free University of Berlin. As of 2023 [update] he is a professor at CUNY Graduate Center, and directs the Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean. [3]
He became senior editor of The Americas in 2021, and joined the board of the Hispanic American Historical Review that same year. [2]
His African Kings and Black Slaves (2019) uses historical archives of Europe and Africa in order to understand interactions between Europeans and Africans during the first one hundred years of interaction, to reinterpret how European ideas about Africa were shaped by their own cultural and social backgrounds, and how African leaders demanded European participation in African rituals and diplomacy. European preconceptions determined who was to be considered a sovereign people, judgments that were the basis for decisions on who could be enslaved and who couldn't. [4]
The globalAfrican diaspora is the worldwide collection of communities descended from people from Africa, predominantly in the Americas. The African populations in the Americas are descended from haplogroup L genetic groups of native Africans. The term most commonly refers to the descendants of the native West and Central Africans who were enslaved and shipped to the Americas via the Atlantic slave trade between the 16th and 19th centuries, with their largest populations in Brazil, the United States, and Haiti. However, the term can also be used to refer to African descendants who immigrated to other parts of the world consensually. Some scholars identify "four circulatory phases" of this migration out of Africa. The phrase African diaspora gradually entered common usage at the turn of the 21st century. The term diaspora originates from the Greek διασπορά which gained popularity in English in reference to the Jewish diaspora before being more broadly applied to other populations.
Creole peoples may refer to various ethnic groups around the world. The term's meaning exhibits regional variations, often sparking debate.
Mulatto is a racial classification to refer to people of mixed African and European ancestry. Its use is considered outdated and offensive in some countries and languages, such as English with the exceptions of some Anglophone Caribbean or West Indian countries and Dutch, but it does not have the same associations in languages such as Spanish and Portuguese. Among Latin Americans in the US, for instance, the term can be a source of pride. A mulatta is a female mulatto.
Zambo or Sambu is a racial term historically used in the Spanish Empire to refer to people of mixed Amerindian and African ancestry. Occasionally in the 21st century, the term is used in the Americas to refer to persons who are of mixed African and Indigenous American ancestry.
Afro–Latin Americans or Black Latin Americans are Latin Americans of full or mainly sub-Saharan African ancestry.
African diaspora religions, also described as Afro-American religions, are a number of related beliefs that developed in the Americas in various nations of the Caribbean, Latin America and the Southern United States. They derive from traditional African religions with some influence from other religious traditions, notably Christianity and Islam.
Afro-Caribbean people or African Caribbean are Caribbean people who trace their full or partial ancestry to Africa. The majority of the modern Afro-Caribbean people descend from the Africans taken as slaves to colonial Caribbean via the trans-Atlantic slave trade between the 15th and 19th centuries to work primarily on various sugar plantations and in domestic households. Other names for the ethnic group include Black Caribbean, Afro or Black West Indian or Afro or Black Antillean. The term Afro-Caribbean was not coined by Caribbean people themselves but was first used by European Americans in the late 1960s.
Slavery in the Spanish American viceroyalties was an economic and social institution which existed throughout the Spanish Empire including Spain itself. Enslaved Africans were brought over to the continent for their labour, indigenous people were enslaved until the 1543 laws that prohibited it.
Africanisms refers to characteristics of African culture that can be traced through societal practices and institutions of the African diaspora. Throughout history, the dispersed descendants of Africans have retained many forms of their ancestral African culture. Also, common throughout history is the misunderstanding of these remittances and their meanings. The term usually refers to the cultural and linguistic practices of West and Central Africans who were transported to the Americas during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Africanisms have influenced the cultures of diverse countries in North and South America and the Caribbean through language, music, dance, food, animal husbandry, medicine, and folklore.
Atlantic Creole is a cultural identifier of those with origins in the transatlantic settlement of the Americas via Europe and Africa.
The Creoles of color are a historic ethnic group of Louisiana Creoles that developed in the former French and Spanish colonies of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Northwestern Florida, in what is now the United States. French colonists in Louisiana first used the term "Creole" to refer to people born in the colony, rather than in Europe, thus drawing a distinction between Old-World Europeans and Africans from their descendants born in the New World. Today, many of these Creoles of color have assimilated into Black culture, while some chose to remain a separate yet inclusive subsection of the African American ethnic group.
Richard Price is an American anthropologist and historian, best known for his studies of the Caribbean and his experiments with writing ethnography.
Gwendolyn Midlo Hall was an American historian who focused on the history of slavery in the Caribbean, Latin America, Louisiana, Africa, and the African Diaspora in the Americas. Discovering extensive French and Spanish colonial documents related to the slave trade in Louisiana, she wrote Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (1992), studied the ethnic origins of enslaved Africans brought to Louisiana, as well as the process of creolization, which created new cultures. She changed the way in which several related disciplines are researched and taught, adding to scholarly understanding of the diverse origins of cultures throughout the Americas.
Afro-Mexicans, also known as Black Mexicans, are Mexicans who have heritage from sub-Saharan Africa and identify as such. As a single population, Afro-Mexicans include individuals descended from both free and enslaved Africans who arrived to Mexico during the colonial era, as well as post-independence migrants. This population includes Afro-descended people from neighboring English, French, and Spanish-speaking countries of the Caribbean and Central America, descendants of enslaved Africans in Mexico and those from the Deep South during Slavery in the United States, and to a lesser extent recent migrants directly from Africa. Today, there are localized communities in Mexico with significant although not predominant African ancestry. These are mostly concentrated in specific communities, including the populations of the Oaxaca, Huetamo, Lázaro Cárdenas, Guerrero, and Veracruz states.
An Afro-Guatemalan person is a person who lives in Guatemala, but has African decency in their historical and cultural roots. This term intertwines the conquest of America by the Spanish. The Afro-Guatemalan population is not numerous today. Although it is difficult to determine specific figures, it is reported that Afro-Guatemalans represent only between 1% and 2% of the country's population. According to the Council on Hemispheric Affairs. They are of mainly English-speaking West Indian (Antillean) and Garifuna origin. They are found in the Caribbean coast, in Livingston, Puerto Barrios and Santo Tomas. In the 17th century, many enslaved blacks were able to secure for themselves or at least their future children through marriage to free people. Many of these marriages were with Mayans or Europeans, which created a mix between blacks, Mayans and Europeans. This resulted in a significant mestizo population that, over the years, has continued to dilute traces of African ancestry in many cases. Today this can be referred to as Afro-mestizos due to miscegenation.
African American Texans or Black Texans are residents of the state of Texas who are of African ancestry and people that have origins as African-American slaves. African Americans formed a unique ethnic identity in Texas while facing the problems of societal and institutional discrimination as well as colorism for many years. The first person of African heritage to arrive in Texas was Estevanico, who came to Texas in 1528.
For a history of Afro-Caribbean people in the UK, see British African Caribbean community.
African Americans in Louisiana or Black Louisianians are residents of the U.S. state of Louisiana who are of African ancestry; those native to the state since colonial times descend from the many African slaves working on indigo and sugarcane plantations under French colonial rule.
The Sierra Leone Creole people are an ethnic group of Sierra Leone. The Sierra Leone Creole people are descendants of freed African-American, Afro-Caribbean, and Liberated African slaves who settled in the Western Area of Sierra Leone between 1787 and about 1885. The colony was established by the British, supported by abolitionists, under the Sierra Leone Company as a place for freedmen. The settlers called their new settlement Freetown. Today, the Sierra Leone Creoles are 1.2 percent of the population of Sierra Leone.
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