Making Gullah: A History of Sapelo Islanders, Race, and the American Imagination

by Melissa L. Cooper

During the 1920s and 1930s, anthropologists and folklorists became obsessed with uncovering connections between African Americans and their African roots. At the same time, popular print media and artistic productions tapped the new appeal of black folk life, highlighting African-styled voodoo networks, positioning beating drums and blood sacrifices as essential elements of black folk culture. Inspired by this curious mix of influences, researchers converged on one site in particular, Sapelo Island, Georgia, to seek support for their theories about "African survivals." The legacy of that body of research is the area's contemporary identification as a Gullah community and a set of broader notions about Gullah identity.

This wide-ranging history upends a long tradition of scrutinizing the Low Country blacks of Sapelo Island by refocusing the observational lens on those who studied them. Cooper 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 movement, and black land loss and land struggles in coastal black communities in the Low Country. What emerges is a fascinating examination of Gullah people's heritage, and how it was reimagined and transformed to serve vastly divergent ends over the decades.

Genres: History, American History, Nonfiction

296 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2017

About the author

Historian. Professor, Writer.

Reviews

[Thom DeLair]

When I picked up this book I thought I was going to learn about Gullah history, instead the book was mainly about the historiography and researchers who studied the inhabitants of Sapelo Island in Georgia. As someone who is an outsider to that culture it was probably more instructive to learn about the outsiders over the 20th century who went to learn about the culture and what motivations and intentions that had clouded their research and interpretations as well as bit about the national evolution on race perceptions through the century, how that shaped presentations of the Gullah culture to a national audience and what that meant more broadly about black identity among the broader national discourse.

While the first five chapter investigate how researchers and outsiders understood the culture, the last chapter focuses more on Gullah/Geechee agency with voices that are specifically from that culture and how they are articulating their contemporary dilemmas with encroaching land development, property taxes and cultural preservation. The last chapter also hints that this book is meant to compliment further detail from the SRS 2005 report on Gullah/Geechee history.

I found it an excellent example of showing how history is told and how it shapes national consciousness, but also, as mentioned in the final chapter, the important parts of how this culture of people played an important role in US history while being their own distinct group.

[Max Booher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Melissa Cooper has produced a richly documented history of ethnography and cultural anthropology of the so-called Gullah/Geechee communities in the coastal island regions of South Carolina and Georgia.

Having read Catherine Stewart’s “Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project” a couple years ago, I found “Making Gullah” to be a satisfying complement.

One big takeaway from this book: fiction writers, along with well-meaning but deeply biased “scientific” ethnographers, are responsible for the widespread misperceptions about regions and subcultures that they find exotic and fascinating. And, in subsequent generations, these misperceptions become codified as historical and sociological “facts” and used as relevant, verifiable source material for further research and conclusions. Falsehoods compounding falsehoods.

Cooper’s analysis forces me to re-conceive much of what I understand about history in general: How much of my “knowledge” derives from utter bullshit?

[gnarlyhiker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Solid read. High recommend.

You will be blown away.

[Mimi · Rating 4 out of 5]

a very interesting history of a wonderful part of our country.