Contents -- Contributors -- Prologue: "The Middle Passage Blues" -- 1 The Middle Passage between History and Fiction: Introductory Remarks -- Part I: "Voyage through Death . . ." -- 2 Patterns in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1662-1867: New Indications of African Origins of Slaves Arriving in the Americas -- 3 The Slave Ship Dance -- 4 The (De)Construction of the "Other" in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano -- 5 Landings: Robert Hayden's and Kamau Brathwaite's Poetic Renderings of the Middle Passage in Comparative Perspective -- 6 The Poetics of Abjection in Beloved -- 7 Surviving through a Pattern of Timeless Moments: A Reading of Caryl Phillips's Crossing the River -- Part II: ". . . To Life upon These Shores" -- 8 Dislocation, Violence, and the Language of Sentiment -- 9 The Color of Money: Economic Structures of Race and Gender under Slavery -- 10 Judicial Nullification: The South Carolinian Movement to Reopen the African Slave Trade in the 1850s -- 11 Africa in South Carolina: Mamie Garvin Fields's Lemon Swamp and Other Places -- 12 "The Persistence of Tradition": The Retelling of Sea Islands Culture in Works by Julie Dash, Gloria Naylor, and Paule Marshall -- 13 The African American Concept of the Fantastic as Middle Passage -- Part III: "In Africa, There Are No Niggers" -- 14 The Enigma of the Return -- 15 The Hues and Uses of Liberia -- 16 Voyage into the Heart of Africa: Pauline Hopkins and of One Blood -- 17 African Americans in Africa: Black Missionaries and the "Congo Atrocities." 1890-1910 -- 18 Sexual Violence and the Black Atlantic: On Alice Walker's Possessing the Secret of Joy -- 19 Alice Walker, Activist: Matron of FORWARD -- 20 Passages to Identity: Re-Membering the Diaspora in Marshall, Phillips, and Cliff -- 21 Return Passages: Maryse Condé Brings Tituba Back to Barbados.

22 Mediterranean Passage: The Beginnings of an African Italian Literature and the African American Example -- Epilogue: "Transatlantic Passages Revisited, Tenerife" -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- X -- Y -- Z.