Faculty

Edda L. Fields-Black

Rank: Associate Professor
Ph.D.: University of Pennsylvania, 2001
Department Member Since: 2001

Dr. Fields-Black is a specialist in early and pre-colonial African history whose research interests extend into the African Diaspora.

Fields-Black’s first manuscript Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008) uses a unique blend of interdisciplinary sources and methods to chronicle the development of tidal rice-growing technology by the inhabitants of the West African Rice Coast region, the region where the majority of captives disembarking in South Carolina and Georgia originated. By integrating linguistic evidence, biological and botanical studies of mangrove ecosystems, oral traditions, and travelers’ accounts from the first European traders to visit the coastal region, Deep Roots reconstructs a historical period pre-dating the first written sources for the region and beginning more than a millennium before the trans-Atlantic slave trade when both West African rice and rice farmers became important commodities. This important study is the first to apply the comparative method of historical linguistics to the Atlantic languages of West Africa’s coast. The narrative reveals the development of highly specialized and intensely localized agricultural technology and identities indigenous to West Africa’s coastal littoral. It presents a rare picture of dynamic early coastal West African societies, challenging Africanists’ assumptions that rice-growing technology diffused from the interior to the coast. A picture of a dynamic, diverse, highly specialized and localized pre-colonial Africa also stands in sharp contrast to Americanists’ constructions of a static, undifferentiated pre-modern Africa which acted as the progenitor of cultures in the African Diaspora. Deep Roots builds on the underlying premise of the comparative method of historical linguistics—inheritance, innovation, and borrowing—to fashion a theory of cultural change which is sufficiently open and elastic to encompass the diversity of communities, cultures, and forms of expression in Africa and the African Diaspora.

Dr. Fields-Black’s second book-length project tentatively titled Treading in the Trench: Transformation on West Africa’s Rice Coast Region and South Carolina and Georgia Rice Plantations will use the comparative method of historical linguistics to investigate how peasant farmers in the West African Rice Coast developed and transformed the West African rice knowledge system in response to internal factors such as climate change and migration prior to the advent of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. From this historical backdrop, the study will use plantation documents written by planters and overseers to examine which aspects of the West African rice knowledge system enslaved laborers who originated in the Senegambia transmitted to Lowcountry rice plantations, asking the following questions: Which aspects of the West African rice knowledge system did enslaved laborers incorporate into commercial rice-farming on Lowcountry rice plantations? How and why did enslaved laborers continue practicing African rice farming and processing techniques on Lowcountry plantations? How did external factors, the institution of enslavement and the commercial rice industry, transform African rice farming techniques over time? What effects did skilled labor, “African” sowing, processing, and water-control techniques, have on enslaved laborers and communities who used them for commercial, as opposed to subsistence, production? Did the transformation, mechanization, and “de-Africanization” of these “African” rice farming techniques on Lowcountry plantations ameliorate deadly work regimes for enslaved laborers? In addition, Treading in the Trench will investigate how cultures among peasants in pre-colonial West Africa and among enslaved communities in the New World developed differently, probing the role language—the loss of African languages and the creation of Creole languages—played in these historical processes.

Professor Fields-Black serves as the Faculty Advisor for Carnegie Mellon’s African and African American Studies Minor and teaches courses on African history from the early pre-colonial to the neo-colonial period, slavery and freedom in Africa and the New World, West African history, globalization in African History, and the making of the African Diaspora. Her research has been funded by the Woodrow Wilson, Ford, Annenberg, and Mellon Foundations as well as by Fulbright-Hays. Professor Fields-Black’s has received funding from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation: Institute for the Study of Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Technology and the Henry Luce Foundation Project: The Greening of Early Undergraduate Education at Carnegie Mellon.


Office:
BH 362
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Phone:
412.268.8012
Email:
fieldsblack@cmu.edu

Publications