The Department of Geography presents: The 23rd Carl O. Sauer Memorial Lecture
IN THE SHADOW OF SLAVERY: Africa's Food Legacy in the Atlantic World
with award-winning author Judith Carney
Wednesday, October 23, 2019 4:00 p.m Lecture and reception
Chevron Auditorium, International House
University of California, Berkeley
The popular image of Africa today is of a hungry continent, chronically unable to feed itself. But it was not always so. A striking feature of the slavery era are the first-person accounts that credit the enslaved with the introduction of specific foods to the Americas, all previously grown in Africa. These crops are now known and the ways they arrived understood. Africa's food crops were a crucial underpinning of the transatlantic commerce in human beings. This lecture exposes the slave ship as the unwitting conveyor of African crops to the Americas, and reveals how the enslaved pioneered their cultivation and shaped the celebrated foodways of the Diaspora.
