******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ********************
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*****************************************************************
NY Times, July 19, 2019
Colin Palmer, Historian of the African Diaspora, Is Dead at 75
By Neil Genzlinger
Colin A. Palmer, a historian who broadened the understanding of the
African diaspora, showing that the American slave trade was only one
part of a phenomenon that spanned centuries and influenced cultures
worldwide, died on June 20 in Kingston, Jamaica. He was 75.
His family announced the death but did not specify the cause. Professor
Palmer, who lived in Yonkers, had traveled to Kingston to begin work on
an interpretive history of Jamaica, his native country.
Professor Palmer published his first of many books in 1976, at a time
when the black power movement and issues of black identity were
prominent in the United States. But it wasn’t about the Civil War-era
slave trade; it was called “Slaves of the White God: Blacks in Mexico,
1570-1650,” chronicling a period when the colonies that would become the
United States were still in their formative stages. The book set him on
a career-long path.
“Palmer definitely brought about a deeper, more nuanced understanding of
the African diaspora, one that extended well beyond African-American
history or the history of the slave trade,” said James H. Sweet, who as
a graduate student worked with Professor Palmer and is now Vilas-Jartz
distinguished professor of history at the University of Wisconsin.
Professor Palmer did more than just show that the African diaspora was
not a single event; he examined the various strands of it for
differences and similarities.
“He argued that the millions of African-descended peoples were united by
a past based significantly on the struggles against racial oppression,”
Professor Sweet said by email, “and despite their cultural and political
variations, diaspora peoples faced broadly similar historical challenges
in realizing themselves.”
Professor Palmer urged students and fellow scholars to consider whether
the term “African diaspora” was even appropriate, given the cultural and
linguistic diversity within the African continent, and to make sure that
any examination of diaspora began with a study of Africa itself.
“Africa, in all of its cultural richness and diversity, remained very
much alive in the receiving societies as the various ethnic groups
created new cultures and recreated their old ways as circumstances
allowed,” he wrote in an article for Perspectives on History magazine in
1998. “Consequently, the study of the modern African diaspora,
particularly the aspect of it that is associated with the Atlantic slave
trade, cannot be justifiably separated from the study of the home
continent.”
Professor Palmer also wrote well-regarded articles and books on the
Caribbean countries, including “Eric Williams and the Making of the
Modern Caribbean” (2006), about the historian and politician who led
Trinidad and Tobago to independence. In an academic career of more than
40 years, he taught at Oakland University in Michigan, the University of
North Carolina, the City University of New York Graduate Center and
Princeton University. In the classroom and in his writings, he sought to
counter an earlier generation of scholarship that filtered black history
through a white lens.
“Any history of the peoples of African descent must be written from
their standpoint,” he said in a talk at the Harlem Book Fair in 2010,
“and must be centered on them, in laserlike fashion.”
“It is their optic that is important,” he added, “their experiences that
are paramount. Their voices are the central ones, and their complicated
lives must get center stage.”
Colin Alphonsous Palmer was born on March 23, 1944, in Lambs River,
Jamaica. His father, Cecil, was assistant superintendent of public works
for Westmoreland, Jamaica; his mother, Gladys (Malcolm) Palmer, was
Lambs River postmistress.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in 1964 at University College of the West
Indies at Mona in Jamaica and was considering teaching secondary school
when he was offered a graduate fellowship at the University of
Wisconsin, which had begun a “comparative tropical history program.” He
earned a master’s degree there in 1966 and a Ph.D. in 1970.
His dissertation explored the subject that became his first book —
although when he went to Mexico to begin his research, he encountered
considerable misinformation.
“A young student politely told me that I was embarking on a wild-goose
chase,” he recalled in an article on the website
smithsonianeducation.org. “Mexico had never imported slaves from Africa,
he said, fully certain that the nation’s peoples of African descent were
relatively recent arrivals.”
Someone else told him that Mexico’s blacks were descendants of escaped
slaves from North America and Cuba. But his research later showed that
the Spaniards had brought in black slaves as early as the 1520s.
Professor Palmer identified five streams of African diaspora, the first
being the initial spread of humans from Africa in prehistory.
“To study early humankind is, in effect, to study this diaspora,” he
wrote in Perspectives on History, although he acknowledged that “some
scholars may argue, with considerable merit, that this early African
exodus is so different in character from later movements and settlements
that it should not be seen as constituting a phase of the diasporic
process.”
There were two other “premodern” streams, as he called them. One
involved the movement of Bantu-speaking peoples out of the areas now
known as Nigeria and Cameroon to other parts of Africa and India in
about 3000 B.C. The other was related to trading in the fifth century B.C.
The Atlantic slave trade, which he said began in earnest in the 15th
century, was the fourth stream; the fifth began after slavery’s demise
and continues today.
Professor Palmer taught at Oakland University from 1969 until 1980, when
he moved to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, eventually
becoming history department chairman. He helped establish the
university’s Afro-American Studies Program. In 1994 he moved to the CUNY
Graduate Center, and in 2000 he became Dodge professor of history at
Princeton, where he taught until 2011. From 2000 to 2012 he directed the
Scholars in Residence Program at the Schomburg Center for Research in
Black Culture in Manhattan.
He is survived by his wife, Myrtle Thierry-Palmer, whom he married in
1970; a son, Glendon; two daughters, Allison and Andrea Palmer; a
brother, Courtney; and two sisters, Gloria Greenidge and Stephanie Gunter.
Though the history he wrote about was full of oppression, Professor
Palmer saw achievement and resilience in that history as well.
“We should not romanticize it,” he said in the 2010 talk, “because
people’s life chances were circumscribed. They are still being
circumscribed. But there’s a lot to celebrate. There’s a lot to draw
strength from.”
_________________________________________________________
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at:
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com