The Black Atlantic Economy of Culture: How Music Became a Structure of Memory (Black History Month 2026 Series)

The Black Atlantic, as it emerged in the early modern era, was shaped profoundly by disruption. The Atlantic slave trade displaced millions of Africans, fractured kinship systems, interrupted languages, and unsettled the ordinary processes through which societies transmit memory across generations. Historical continuity, which elsewhere might rest upon land, lineage, and stable institutions, was deliberately […]