The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective

A foundational anthropological argument that Afro-American culture was made under slavery rather than transported into it — that enslaved Africans arrived in violently mixed conditions, not as intact social groups carrying stable traditions, and built languages, kinship networks, ritual systems, and practical institutions out of the shared condition of bondage. The theory of creolization as institution-building inside plantation slavery moved scholarship away from listing African survivals toward analyzing how new forms emerged, while Hall's later work on African ethnic clustering provides an important corrective to the sharpest version of the argument.