Gullah Geechee culture is sometimes viewed as static – a common narrative suggests that, isolated from the rest of the country, enslaved Africans and their descendants in the Sea Islands, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida and North Carolina, created a language, tradition and society that insulated them from the mainland US. But this limited imagining deprives Gullah Geechee people of receiving full credit for their contributions to the US south and the country at large.
- Gullah Geechee culture spread across the American South and inland communities, influencing language, music, and religion.
- Gullah-Geechee Diasporas collects essays by scholars, edited by Muhammad Fraser-Rahim and Elizabeth J West, bringing scholarship to general readers.
- Essays reveal Gullah Geechee continuities: enduring traditions, influence on jazz, and diverse Black spiritual practices rooted in places like Charleston.
Even before the US civil war, Gullah influences were seen in places such as Mississippi, Texas and the Caribbean, showing that the Gullah Geechee didn’t remain remote, but rather migrated throughout the country, leaving evidence of their presence in their new homes.
A new book, Gullah-Geechee Diasporas: Knowledge, Culture, and Black Lowcountry Legacies aims to highlight this impact through eight essays by pre-eminent scholars and historians. Edited by Muhammad Fraser-Rahim and Elizabeth J West, the text crafts a wider understanding of Gullah Geechee life and influence, through language, music and religion.
The Guardian spoke to Fraser-Rahim and West about what they hope to achieve with the book. The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Why did you all decide to investigate Gullah Geechee legacies and diaspora?
Fraser-Rahim: This started because me and Elizabeth met maybe 10 years ago on a project that was leading up to the Spoleto arts festival. They were doing this series of talks and lectures about Omar ibn Said [the author of the only known narrative by an enslaved person written in Arabic], Gullah Geechee community, enslaved African Muslims. We were on stage and we were talking, and there was this energy and chemistry of dialogue and that was the impetus for this conversation.
There’s a lot of good work on Gullah Geechee communities, but there’s limited work in the more recent 10, 20 years on Gullah Geechee communities, and what this means both for the past and the future.
West: For me, it’s tied to the work I’ve been doing for probably the last 10 years, which is kind of a switch from the traditional language and literature research that I have been doing. I turned back to archival work and especially looking at the narratives of everyday Black people during this era of slavery.
The one thing that I kept coming across in the research and looking at archives is that once you started tracking descendants of enslaved people, the compass points to the Lowcountry.
Document after document, I just kept seeing this line pointing to the Lowcountry. I got especially interested in South Carolina, mainly because of the families I was tracking in my own research.
Why was it important to make people aware that Gullah Geechee culture did not just exist in this one place, but spread out across the country?
Fraser-Rahim: The Gullah Geechee Heritage Corridor stretches from North Carolina to Florida. Individuals assume that it’s just this idea of the Gullah Islands, as though it’s just one single location. It stretches all along the corridor, but it also goes at least 30, maybe upwards to 60, miles inward as well. Those inward communities [are also] spreading identity, culture in the interior of these locations, in those states.
As people leave, they interact with others. We also have to ask: What happens when Gullah Geechee communities marry other Black communities? How do those identities cross-reference each other? What interaction do you have with Creole communities and Gullah Geechee communities? We could go on and on. I think that the south oftentimes is not taken into consideration of that expansion. The American south is the location of that sacred space of these important Gullah Geechee communities that are able to preserve this rich tradition in a way that we’re only scratching the surface.
West: We always have these conversations as if African Americans were these kind of dissociated beings who were just managed like pieces on a chessboard; that they just got moved around as white people got moved around and that they had no sense of place and identity. That’s absolutely not true.
In the first essay, Ras Michael Brown goes all the way back to pre-Middle Passage Africa and he talks about how Africans themselves moved and migrated across the continent and established a sense of home and belonging. It helps us understand that Africans were not just located in a single place, having never seen anything else throughout their history. That’s not the history of Black [Americans] either. He lays out how Africans brought over these traditions and ways of understanding the world and their belonging as they settled new places. They built ways of knowing and ways of understanding home.
The book also looks at the expansion of religious and spiritual identity beyond Christianity. How did you decide to illustrate this more inclusive understanding of Black spirituality?
Fraser-Rahim: Charleston, South Carolina, is called the Holy City. It’s called that because of French Huguenots [Protestants], the oldest reformed Jewish synagogue is in Charleston, and then certainly the enslaved African Muslim population. Omar ibn Said comes in 1807, but there’s a whole number of other enslaved Africans who occupy time and space there. It begs the question of who, particularly for African Americans, who represents the Black American religious history?
Were there any unexpected insights when you read the essays submitted for the book?
West: It was the music. The chapter by Karen Chandler on the impact of Gullah Geechee culture on jazz. Especially coming from Mississippi, I always thought all points directed to New Orleans. It was fascinating, and such an education for me.
One of the things that I found most brilliant about the book is how it exemplifies the longevity of what we now know as Black American culture. Do you have insights on that preservation of culture and tradition?
West: What I hope the book does for readers is give them a much deeper insight into the through lines and continuities of African American culture.
My interest is focused on how that culture spreads early in the American south, but what these other essays do for us … is emphasize how this culture is still in transition as Blacks in the 20th and 21st centuries are still moving and reshifting their lives, going out from the south and returning to the south. The book captures that dynamic of Black culture and requires us to appreciate the way certain central practices and concepts have been maintained.
The exciting thing is the opportunity to bring the book to readers outside our world. That’s one of the things that is so important to academia in general right now, especially in the climate that we are in. We have to do a better job of helping the public understand the significance and the reach of the kind of work that we do. This is not just a typical academic book where academics are talking to each other. We anticipate that everyday readers who are interested are going to find the book relevant. This helps to give a much rounder picture of how we need to be thinking about Black families and communities throughout the history of Blacks in the south.
