Melissa L. Cooper, “Making Gullah: A History of Sapelo Islanders, Race, and the American Imagination” (UNC Press, 2017)

New Books in African American Studies · May 19, 2017 · 55m

Making Gullah: A History of Sapelo Islanders, Race, and the American Imagination (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) is a wide-ranging history that upends a long tradition of scrutinizing the Low Country blacks of Sapelo Island by outsiders. The book promotes a refocusing, and the observational lens is instead focused on those white and black scholars who the Gullah of Sapelo Island during the early 20th Century. The author uses a wide variety of sources to unmask the connections between the rise of the social sciences, the voodoo craze during the interwar years, the black studies…