Title:

“Two Grandmothers Ago”: New Perspectives on Enslavement, Trauma,

and Healing in the African Diaspora

Edited Volume Proposal

Gillian Richards-Greaves and Kimani Nehusi, eds.

This monograph investigates the prisms through which descendants of enslaved Africans
experience time, trauma, African, blackness, and other identities. It also examines the strategies
they use to cope with residual trauma and persistent societal structures that support or perpetuate
such trauma. The authors will investigate cultural, religious, musical, interpersonal practices, and
other phenomena, to articulate how discourses on enslavement and related factors in the African
Diaspora often run counter to narratives among later African migrants, and mainstream society.
More importantly, the authors will propose innovative strategies for assessing and remedying
persisting traumas in contemporary societies that arose out of the enslavement of African people
by Europeans. To adequately address these concerns, this monograph will be in two overarching
parts: Part I will address “Perspectives on Enslavement, Trauma, and Remembering,” and Part II
will discuss “Strategies for Coping, Healing, and Regrowth.”

The African Diaspora is comprised of peoples of African descent who reside outside the African
continent. The African Diaspora is, however, not a monolithic group, but a collection of diverse
sub-diasporas or ethnicities, which were largely shaped by the factors surrounding their
migration. Thus, for example, the African Diaspora encompasses voluntary migrants, refugees,
and descendants of enslaved Africans. This monograph primarily focuses on the segment of the
African diaspora that resulted from forced migration and enslavement. Anthropologist Robin
Cohen (1997:11) refers to this group as a “Victim Diaspora,” but in this work, we will use the
term “Enslavement African Diaspora” (EAD) to emphasize the basis or process of diasporic
construction, distinguish this diaspora from other diasporas created from forced migration and
trauma, and diminish the objectification and lack of agency inherent in the phrase “Victim
Diaspora.”

The European Trade in Enslaved Africans across the Atlantic was a worldwide atrocity that
facilitated the capture, sale, and enslavement of millions of Africans of diverse ethnic groups, as
well as the destruction of numerous African communities and beginning of the
underdevelopment of African society as a whole. During years of chattel enslavement, which
lasted more than four hundred years, enslavers deliberately employed tactics designed to strip
enslaved Africans of their language and culture, and to dehumanize them. During enslavement,
also, new consignments of enslaved Africans from Africa and the Caribbean buffered the
enslaved population, which was systematically depleted through death caused by old age,
disease, murder, suicide, malnutrition, maltreatment, and other maladies. The sustained infusion
of Africans into the enslaved population resulted in the revitalization of African cultural
practices, the creation of creolized practices (Redfield et. Al 1936; Bethencourt 2011), and the
reconfiguration of other systems of support, such as othermothers and otherfathers (Bush 1990:
86; Collins 2003: 317-323). Moreover, the addition of newly enslaved Africans into the

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oppressed community facilitated acts of remembering and being, specifically, peoples of African
descent.

Although the physical aspects of enslavement were officially abolished in the nineteenth century
with Emancipation Proclamations in the United Kingdom, the United States, and other colonial
governments, the ideologies and systemic structures that undergirded the system persisted after
‘emancipation’ and facilitated the continued subjugation of peoples of African descent.1 For
many of the Enslavement African Diaspora, the trauma of enslavement is a present-past,
undergirded by experiences, memories, and external societal structures. It is an event that ended
in one form but persists in many others. These factors create what Joy DeGruy (2017) terms Post
Traumatic Slave Syndrome, the “Multigenerational trauma together with continued oppression
and absence of opportunity to access the benefit available in the society (105).” Thus, while the
external stresses produced by systemic racism remind the Enslavement African Diaspora of their
traumatic past, internal structures in the larger Black community work to recalibrate time, and
thus, perceptions, understandings, and discourses surrounding the experience of enslavement.

Whether they live in the Caribbean, the United States, or other regions of the world, the
Enslavement African Diaspora continue to compute “lived” time in contradistinction to actual
time. The discrepancy in the calculation of time is largely influenced by the Enslavement African
Diaspora’s personal experiences with previous generations, which in turn, affect how they
remember or misremember enslavement and its continuing aftershocks. According to Antze and
Lambek (2016), “[T]he past and its retrieval in memory hold a curious place in our identities,
one that simultaneously stabilizes those identities in continuity and threatens to disrupt them”
(xvi). Moreover, while the trauma expressed by many in the Enslavement African Diaspora is
underscored by the fracturing of cultural norms and Black humanity, it is also often intensified
by reconceptualization of time and cycles of “remembering.” Thus, for the Enslavement African
Diaspora, “experienced” time is often the source of continued trauma and fractured realities and
expectations. For many, enslavement was not abolished two hundred years ago, but two
grandmothers ago.

This proposal opens the door to a comprehensive investigation of the responses of African
people in the Diaspora to their enforced migration. When approached from this perspective, the
Africans in the Diaspora will be presented as agents in their own social history and not as the
‘other’: lessened, demeaned, dehumanized and pathologized across the divisions into which
western information and knowledge have come to be formatted and the Eurocentric perspectives
through which the world is presented in western scholarship.

We envision this volume will have two overarching sections:

• PART I: PERSPECTIVES ON ENSLAVEMENT, TRAUMA, AND REMEMBERING

• PART II: PICKING UP THE PIECES: ON COPING, HEALING, AND REGROWTH

1
Official emancipation dates vary around the world, although the actual systems remained in place for
much longer. For example, in the English-speaking Caribbean, Slavery was officially abolished in 1834,
in the United States it was abolished in 1865, and in Brazil in
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For this monograph, we seek essays that are informed by diverse disciplinary and theoretical
traditions, such as Afrocentrism, critical race theory, performance theory, critical black studies,
hermeneutics, phenomenology, performance studies, and identities. To engage these multiple
themes, we invite chapters that address the following areas of trauma, memory, and strategies for
healing, particularly in the Enslavement African Diaspora:

• Race, class ethnicity

• Religion and spirituality
• Gender and sexuality
• Food production, consumption, sovereignty, medicine, etc.
• Colonialism, neocolonialism, and identity
• Migration, diaspora, and transnationalism
• Regionally Specific Black foodways
• Carcerality and the Prison Industrial Complex, and Food
• Psychosocial Stress and Mental Health
• Linguistic diversity, expressions, and Creole languages
• Traditional healing practices
• Reparations
• Afrofuturism

This document serves to frame the overall aim of the volume so that authors can incorporate
these connections in their abstracts and chapters. We hope that we have captured the approaches
we welcome in the exposition above. But to be explicit, we welcome papers representing all
views from within the parameters of African people examining their experiences of enslavement
and after. This document is also a preliminary call for abstracts. Please submit abstracts of 500
words or less, along with a CV and a short bio by August 30th. Abstracts will used in the
prospectus for the volume, which I hope to present to Editors by September 30, 2020. After a
publisher has been determined, I will consider sending out a wider call for additional chapters.

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References

Antze, Paul and Michael Lambek. 2016. Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory
New York: Routledge.

Bethencourt, Francisco. 2011. “Creolization of the Atlantic World: The Portuguese and the
Kongolese.” Portuguese Studies 27(1): 56-69.

Bush, Barbara. Slave Women in Caribbean Society:1650-1838. Bloomington: Indiana University

Press, 1990.

Cohen, Robin. 1997. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. Seattle: University of Washington

Press.

Collins, Patricia Hill. 2003. “Bloodmothers, Othermothers, and Women-Centered Networks.” In

Reconstructing Gender: A Multicultural Anthology, 3rd ed. Edited by Estelle Disch, 317-323.
Boston: McGraw-Hill.

DeGruy, Dr. Joy. 2017. Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injuring
& Healing. Joy Degruy Publications Inc.

Frie, Roger. 2012. Memory and Responsibility: Navigating Identity and shame in the Germ-
Jewish Experience. Psychoanalytic Psychology 29(2): 206-225.

Redfield, Robert, Ralph Linton, and Melville Herskovits. 1936. “Memorandum on the Study of
Acculturation.” American Anthropologist 39: 149-152.

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