US Slavery's Diaspora: Black Atlantic History at the Crossroads of 'Race', Enslavement, and Colonisation

During the nineteenth century, migration was a central feature of black life in the USA. The combined forces of 'local' slave trading, slaveholder relocation, and colonisation removed African Americans from their homes and further dispersed them throughout the cultural contact zones of the American tropics and Black Atlantic. Insofar as they have been linked to one another, these migrations have been situated as aspects of the African or Black Diasporas, yet the migrants' letters reveal identities secured to US homes and homelands, suggesting that their self-conceptions as Americans, albeit enslaved, formerly enslaved or slave-descended, should qualify or even supersede any description of them as members of the Black or African diasporic communities.