Institutional mysteries

[First paragraph]Africa and the Americas: Interconnections During the Slave Trade. José C. Curto & Renenée Soulodrere-La France (eds.). Trenton NJ: Africa World Press, 2005. vii + 338 pp. (Paper US$ 29.95)Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas. Gwenendolyn Midlo Hall. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. xxii + 225 pp. (Cloth US$ 34.95)The forced movement of enslaved Africans to the New World – before the nineteenth century, surely the largest and longest such uprooting and transfer of people in global history – resulted over time in a vast corpus of research and publication, of which these two books are a part. The first is an edited collection of twelve essays, preceded by a slightly giddy preface; the second is its author’s attempt to widen her research on African ethnic groups in the Americas, so as to demonstrate their existence. The themes of both books exemplify recent thinking among scholars of the African-American experience.