The Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage (Taylor & Francis Press) includes open access articles. You can find these on the journal website (link). Examples of articles currently available with free access include:

"Bioarchaeological Approaches to African Diasporas in the Twenty-First Century: Intercontinental and Global Legacies of Displacement," by Kristrina A. Shuler and Andreana S. Cunningham. Abstract: Bioarchaeological research offers a window into health and life experiences in the past, including the biocultural dimensions of social identities and structural inequalities experienced by enslaved and free Afro-descendants across the African diaspora. Given the long history of descendant communities and advocates contesting the authority of institutions to curate human remains in perpetuity, critical dialogues over the past several decades have stimulated new directions in the discipline of African diaspora bioarchaeology alongside increased engagement with Black scholarship and community and client-based collaborations. We build upon previous discussions and critiques to examine the current state of African diaspora bioarchaeology in global context in the early decades of the twenty-first century. We present a macro-level, chronological examination of published African diaspora and colonial African bioarchaeological research by region between 2001 and 2023 and conclude with a discussion of the current state of practices and engagement in the field and ethics of care. Keywords: African diaspora, Afro-descendants, slavery, emancipation, structural violence, bioarchaeology, human skeletal remains, ethics of care (article link).

"Enslavement to Enlistment: Refiguring Opportunity for African Americans in the Military," by Katherine Hayes and Sophie Minor. Abstract: What does "opportunity" look like for African Americans in the United States military? While the military has been viewed as a vehicle for protecting freedom, it has done so in conditions of racial capitalism and settler colonialism. Through these analytical lenses, opportunity is generally idealized as property, but we propose that Black individuals associated with the military may have seen opportunity as relationality through land and place. We discuss Black constructions of opportunity at the military site of Fort Snelling in Minnesota during the nineteenth century, from enslaved individuals to enlisted Black Regulars garrisoned in the 1880s. Changing expectations of labor and social landscape shaped these opportunities, configured within structures of racism which were themselves adapting to the efforts of African Americans to seek opportunity. We offer archaeological materials and historical documents for potential use in public interpretation that attends to both oppression and creative pursuits of opportunity. Keywords: U.S. military, slavery, black regulars, settler colonialism, critical Indigenous studies (article link).

"Black Disability Politics in Black Military Service: A Perspective from Nineteenth-Century Fort Davis, Texas," by Laurie A. Wilkie and Katherine M. Kinkopf. Abstract: This article considers the role of the military in debilitating Black soldiers, focusing on the men who served in the Western Frontier immediately following the end of the Civil War, with particular attention to the men who served at Fort Davis, one of a string of posts located in West Texas. We frame this archaeological and archival research with critical disability studies to show how these men were motivated by what has recently been termed "Black Disability Politics," acting both individually and collectively for their community's care. The men, popularly known as the "Buffalo Soldiers," occupy an important space in heritage narratives around citizenship rights, valor, and masculine achievement among African-descended people. Understanding fully the circumstances they endured and overcame contributes nuance and dimensionality to that history, while also providing a lens through which to understand the challenges faced by women and Black and Indigenous People of Color in the military today. Keywords: Black disability politics, critical disability studies, historical archaeology,biopolitics, health (article link).

"Valongo, the Place of the Ancestors: Spiritual Practices among Enslaved Africans in Nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro," by Tania Andrade Lima. Abstract: In 2017, UNESCO added Valongo Wharf to its list of World Heritage Sites. Located in Rio de Janeiro's Port Zone, the wharf is a place of memory associated with the transatlantic slave trade, which has been compared to other sites that have witnessed intense human suffering, such as Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Gorée Island, among others. This chapter explores the spiritual practices of the "wretched of the Earth," as Frantz Fanon named those Africans dehumanized by European colonialism. More specifically, it focuses on the Africans shipped to Valongo to be sold as slaves in Rio de Janeiro and who left vestiges of their spiritual beliefs, recovered through archaeological research. Here, these remains are analyzed from a decolonial perspective, born from the reflections of critical Latin American thinkers who reject the diverse forms of domination and oppression inflicted by Northern hemisphere powers on subaltern populations of the global South. Keywords: Valongo Wharf, urban slavery, spiritual beliefs, decolonial thought, diasporic communities, historical archaeology, archaeology of the African diaspora, descendant communities (article link).

"Renegotiating and Theorizing Heritage in the Context of 'Disaster' in the Caribbean: The Entanglement of Haitian Disaster-Related Histories," by Joseph Sony Jean and Jerry Michel. Abstract: This article examines how cultural heritage is negotiated in disaster contexts. One month after the earthquake on August 14, 2021 in Haiti, we surveyed damaged heritage sites and spoke with residents in the South and Grande-Anse departments about their experiences and perceptions. Via this research, we found a lack of disaster preparedness and few existing response mechanisms for managing cultural heritage amidst disaster. This article argues for more attention to heritage theory and practice in relation to disaster. It also shares concrete information about our research and its outcomes to create a dialogue between research needs and actual research results. Local voices are fundamental to the planning and decision-making necessary to sustain the future of Haiti's cultural heritage. Heritage studies in the Caribbean need to formulate and theorize more cogent critical questions about heritage – in particular, about how it is envisioned in urgent times. Keywords: Heritage studies, archaeological heritage, disaster, Caribbean, Haiti, coloniality, local voices, urgency (article link).

The Restorative Justice in Heritage Studies and Archaeology book series, published by Routledge Press and edited by Richard Paul Benjamin (University of Liverpool), Christopher C. Fennell (University of Illinois), and Nedra K. Lee (University of Massachusetts), seeks proposals for single-author, multi-author, or edited books. Restorative justice in heritage and archaeology embraces initiatives for reconciliation of past societal transgressions using processes that are multivocal, dialogic, historically informed, community based, negotiated, and transformative. This series will present works that promote the active and often unconventional ways that archaeologists, historians, and heritage scholars are contributing to a process of remaking. Our authors work to define and illuminate the best practices for restorative justice in these fields and to identify how practitioners and their collaborators are working to redress, reconcile, and remake contemporary society.

Such restorative justice efforts typically focus on multiple perspectives and modes of reconciliation, rather than a narrow vision of retribution and punishment. Reparation initiatives are often multivocal, layered, multiplex, and visionary in this way. Restorative justice initiatives often occur through such a collaborative process which entails relationship building and story-telling, accountability and truth-telling, and reparative engagement.

Our first two volumes in the series are Grappling with Monuments of Oppression: Moving from Analysis to Activism (link) and Combating Oppression with New Commemorations (link).

Interested in proposing a book for this series? Contact one of us: Nedra.Lee@umb.edu, Richard.Benjamin@liverpool.ac.uk, or cfennell@illinois.edu.

General guidelines for authors are available from Routledge Press.

Follow this initiative through our website, and on Facebook.

Association for the Study of African American Life and History
110th Annual Meeting and Conference

September 24–28, 2025, Atlanta, Georgia

The ASALH Academic Program Committee is pleased to invite proposal submissions for panels, workshops, roundtables, papers, posters, media sessions, and Woodson Lightning Rounds at the 2025 ASALH Annual Meeting and Conference. The conference will be held in person in Atlanta, GA on September 24-28, 2025.

As we approach our 110th ASALH conference, we seek to showcase versatile and innovative historical research that reaches beyond our theme of African American labor or highlights its significance to the Black experience. Black labor has been central to political, economic, social, cultural, and technological transformations across centuries of global society. Therefore, our capacity to work equates to our capacity to struggle, build, critique, and transform. Scholarship across the wide spectrum of the sociohistorical experience of African Americans will help the 110th annual conference ascend to become our greatest gathering.

Our 110th annual conference will also preserve and strengthen African American history in these stressful times. Black history continues to be assaulted on multiple political fronts, and we require scholars committed to studying the African American experience across many fields, topics, and interests. We especially call on emerging scholars and graduate students to submit research from their subfields. ASALH grows stronger each year as new scholars introduce their work at our annual conference.

Coinciding with momentous events like the 2024 election and historical anniversaries such as the 100th anniversary of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the 70th anniversary of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the 60th anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X, and the 40th anniversary of the 1985 bombing of MOVE, our 2025 conference will again boast cutting-edge analysis, debate, and critique that align with Carter G. Woodson's vision of Black history. We call on all scholars, organizations, students, independent researchers, and others interested in the African American experience to convene in Atlanta, Georgia, for the continued reshaping of African American history and thought.

Learn more at https://convention2.allacademic.com/one/asalh/asalh25/.

"I've Known Rivers": The Ecologies of Black Life and Resistance
12th Biennial Conference and 25th Anniversary
Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD)

October 29 to November 2, 2025, St. Louis, Missouri

The Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD) invites scholars, artists, activists, and community members from around the globe to join us in St. Louis, Missouri, for our 12th Biennial Conference -- a historic 25th anniversary celebration of African and African Diaspora scholarship, culture, and resistance.

Our host site, Saint Louis, sits at the confluence of two iconic rivers, the Mississippi and the Missouri. These continuously moving waterways have carved into the landscape, reshaping the bedrock that guides humans, plants and animals together. They can yet prove unpredictable as their banks rise and retreat as they nourish and cleanse. ASWAD's 2025 Conference theme takes as its inspiration the river, and waterways, as an analytical framework for Black lives past and present. In addition to Langston Hughes's poem, Vincent Harding's book, There is a River suggests the river as a metaphor for Black freedom struggle. Rivers are "powerful, tumultuous, and roiling with life; at other times meandering and turgid, covered with the ice and snow of seemingly endless winters." At its best, the Black freedom struggle "has moved consistently to the ocean of humankind's most courageous hopes for freedom and integrity."

View a Preliminary Program for the conference.

"United We Stand: Fortifying Black Communities
through Courage, Dignity and Joy"
16th Annual Lemon Project Spring Symposium

March 20-21, 2026, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia

The 2026 Spring Symposium will explore the following questions: How can Black people and their communities fortify themselves through cultural practices, powerful history, and collective action? How do Black communities find joy and courage amid constant challenges and dehumanization? In what ways can dignity serve as a survival mechanism for Black communities? How can universities and other institutions who are confronting slavery and its legacies continue to work towards repair and healing despite challenges?

During his keynote, "What Would the Ancestors Say?" at last year's symposium, Dr. Daniel Black made a powerful call to action, urging us to unify and create a more just society for present and future generations. Dr. Black reminded us that "we are the way makers and the dream shakers." Building and maintaining thriving communities requires the power of our imagination and commitment to collective work and responsibility. We aim to continue these conversations as we focus on the theme: "United We Stand: Fortifying Black Communities through Courage, Dignity, and Joy."

Call for proposals, due October 10, 2025, https://www.wm.edu/sites/lemonproject/annual_symposium/.

New Book

Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid,
and Black Freedom during the Civil War
By Edda L. Fields-Black
Oxford University Press
776 pp., ISBN-13 978-0197552797, 2024.

Description from the Publisher:

New Book

Sunset Limited: An Autobiography of Creole
By Wendy A. Gaudin
LSU Press
288 pp., ISBN-13 978-0807183656, 2025.

Description from the Publisher:

New Book

Underworld Work: Black Atlantic Religion Making in Jim Crow New Orleans
By Ahmad Greene-Hayes
University of Chicago Press
296 pp., ISBN-13 978-0226838861, 2025.

Description from the Publisher:

New Book

After Palmares: Diaspora, Inheritance, and the Afterlives of Zumbi
By Marc A. Hertzman
Duke University Press
480 pp., ISBN-13 978-1478030522, 2024.

Description from the Publisher:

New Book

Undoing Things: How Objects, Bodies and Worlds Come Apart
Edited by Gavin Lucas and Shannon Lee Dawdy
Routledge Press
360 pp., ISBN-13 978-1032061825, 2025.

Description from the Publisher:

New Book

Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea
By Marcus Rediker
Viking Press
416 pp., ISBN-13 978-0525558347, 2025.

Description from the Publisher:

Barbara E. Frank. Griot Potters of the Folona: A History of an African Ceramic Tradition. Indiana University Press, 2022. Illustrations, maps, tables. 526 pp. (paper), ISBN 978-0-253-05899-7.

H-Net Book Review, published by H-Africa, https://networks.h-net.org/h-africa (Feb. 2025).

Reviewed for H-Africa by Elizabeth Perrill (University of North Carolina Greensboro).

Winner of the Arnold Rubin Outstanding Publication Award, Griot Potters of the Folona was referred to as a "magnum opus" at the nineteenth triennial banquet of the Arts Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA), and it fulfills this description in every sense of the term. Barbara E. Frank brings together not only forty years of original research but also dozens of scholars' insights from the fields of art history, anthropology, history, folklore, linguistics, and archaeology. Frank's 391 illustrations are a testament to her meticulous documentary impulse and rigor. Drawn from the author's archives, as well as the work of Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi, Vera Viditz-Ward, Mamadou Samaké, Susan Cooksey, Robert Soppelsa, Kay Fleming, Renée Colin-Noguès, Janet Goldner, Kathleen Bickford Berzock, Roland Colin, Anna Craven, Yaëlle Biro, Christoper D. Roy, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Mali-Folkecenter Nyetaa/Dodo, each photograph homes in on a precise aspect of ceramic production or marketing. Frank's scholarly collaboration is a testament to her collegiality and speaks to her centrality in West African historical production.

Chapter by chapter, Frank brings the reader through the complexities of Mande regional assumptions and expanded histories. Diving into the linguistic and ethnic identities central to the expanded Mande region may prove daunting to readers unfamiliar with this field's assumed norms. Thankfully, Frank is careful to spell out these standards, namely, the "blacksmith-potter paradigm," a Mande-speaking norm of intermarriage between male blacksmiths and female potters dating back to the thirteenth or fourteenth century. She then quickly challenges this assumption's universality while introducing readers to a range of nyamakala, craft-based specialists. Through mapping, linguistics, and the unpacking of precise building, forming, and decorating norms, an approach known as chaîne opératoire analysis, Frank depicts a complex relationship between professions, lineages, linguistics, and trade-based identities.[1] We follow her driving research question through the rest of the text: Why do the ceramic lineages of the Folona region in the Southeastern portion of Mali, "jeli potters," see women's ceramics, not just the male professions of oration or artisanal production, as the roots of what it means to be a Folona jeli?

A historical overview of the Folona crossroads region, chapter 2 delves into sociocultural flux based in marriage alliances and movements. Frank lays out the relationships between linguistic-majority Senufo-speaking farming populations and Mande-speaking "foreigners," including artisanal subgroups. The author's tables of family names and professions make complex identities penetrable for those new to Mande studies and beyond. Future scholars should note the author's meticulous use of artists' interviews. A major strength of Frank's analysis is that she focuses on subtle divides in language and lineage. Family lines of the jeli potters of the Folona and narratives told in this region point out definitions of nyamakala, artisanal groups of the Mande heartland to the north, which is distinct from Folona potters' and potter's familial self-definition. Though the lineage names, linguistic variations, and finegrained migration histories are rather dense reading, we are rewarded with insights into migration and regional change that only rigorous anthropological and historical work can provide. We learn that Folona women identify as jeli-bobo (mute griots), ceramics producing families who no longer sing praises but still identify as jeli. Each subsequent chapter provides evidence for how ceramics are tied to and transform the very concept of what it means to be a jeli or griot.

Chapter 3 establishes Frank's rhythm of following each locally focused chapter with one that zooms out to address wider regional histories. Using maps that explicate migrations between Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, and even Ghana, the author synthesizes the work of dozens of scholars. She paints a complex picture of ceramics as a medium central to narratives of identity construction and regional political alliances. Frank's oral histories paint subtle comparisons between technical creation and narratives of self-definition through fine-grained tracing of lineages. Even nonspecialists begin to appreciate and recognize the larger region of cross-pollination implicated in histories of jeli potters and their relations. Indeed, the reader comes to realize that scholars who want to understand sociopolitical transformations in this region must understand the lives and histories of potters.

The rich detail of Frank's technically focused chapter 4 points to her status as a true historian of ceramics. The nuance of photography, graphing of ceramic techniques, and respect for the individuality of each potter's stylistic subtly is a tour de force worthy of emulation. One does wish there was space for more quotations to highlight the voices of individual potters, but this would likely have resulted in the need for a two-volume set. Following Frank's chapter schema, chapter 5 contextualizes the local histories presented in chapter 4. Beginning with a concise summary of the chaîne opératoire method, Frank embarks on a technical contextualization of Folona in the broader region of Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, and Ghana. With the Folona region as the center, Frank draws on her wide network of scholarly references to point out key differences and parallels, from clay acquisition and taboos to surface treatments and firings.

With chapter 6, Frank shifts away from the microcosm of making into the larger context of the market. This is a compelling documentary chapter that traces the consistent creation of some ceramic forms and the near disappearance of others. We learn how forms like water pots and coolers persist, while social changes have affected others. With widespread conversion to Islam, for example, larger beer vessels have nearly died out. As rooflines were covered with overhanging rooflines, ceramic waterspouts in some regions also began to disappear. This sensitive discussion of ceramic traditions as dynamic, and of artists' entrepreneurial attentions to the market, is clearly the result of a genuinely curious engagement with contemporary potters. Frank consistently uses meticulous evidence to paint her picture of change; her household inventories of ceramics and oral narratives trace the ownership, generational use, and life histories of ceramics. And again, she artfully pairs the close-up analysis of Folona with a regional zoom-out to the broader region. Chapter 7 maps expanded context of forms, decorative styles, patterns of use, and innovative creation. We also learn of the ceramic competition that has brought about the success of the jeli potters of the Folona. Through regional comparative histories, Frank reveals the roots of the Folona tradition as lying "south and east of the Mande heartland" (p. 442). With the closing of each chapter, Frank's overarching hypothesis is clarified and bolstered; the reader gains a clearer and clearer vision of the intermarriage, migrations, and maintenances of ceramic traditions at play in the Folona region and beyond.

In the concluding chapter, Frank points out the importance of tracing the histories of the mundane. She reminds us of the need for histories not just from below but also from different positionalities within—histories of the poet and the potter. Frank presents a compelling argument that histories of the women's lineages, those of the jeli potters of the Folona and beyond, must be combined with the male lineage narratives. She compellingly concludes by pointing out that potters of the Folona "redefined what it meant to be a Mande griot, transforming jeliya in the process" (p. 461).

Note [1]. André Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, trans. Anna Bostock Berger (MIT Press, 1993); Pierre Lemonnier, "The Study of Material Culture Today: Toward an Anthropology of Technical Systems," Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 5, no. 2 (1986): 147-86; and Frederic Sellet, "Chaîne Opératoire: The Concept and Its Applications," Lithic Technology 18, nos. 1-2 (1993): 106-12.

[Citation: Elizabeth Perrill. Review of Frank, Barbara E, Griot Potters of the Folona: A History of an African Ceramic Tradition. H-Africa, H-Net Reviews. February, 2025. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes.]

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