Overview

The once-famous trading center of Goree, Senegal, today lies in the busy harbor of the modern city of Dakar. From its beginnings as a modest outpost, Goree became one of the intersections linking African trading routes to the European Atlantic trade. Then as now, people of many nationalities poured into the island: Dutch, English, French, Portuguese, Tukulor, and Wolof. Trading parties brought with them gold, firewood, mirrors, books, and more. They built houses of various forms, using American lumber, French roof tiles, freshly cut straw, and pulverized seashells, and furnished them in a fashion as cosmopolitan as the city itself. A work of architectural history, Portrait of an Island explores the material culture and social relations of West Africa in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Multiple features of eighteenth-century Goree-its demographic diversity; the prominence of women leaders; the phenomenon of identities in flux; and the importance of fashion and international trade-articulate its place in the construction of an early global modernity. An examination of the built and natural landscape, Portrait of an Island deciphers the material culture involved in the ever-changing relationships among male, female, rich, poor, free, and slave.

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9780803254138

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A major contribution to the understanding of early modern building traditions and lifestyles in West Africa, a literature that is missing in the larger architectural body of work. -Nnamdi Elleh, author of African Architecture: Evolution and Transformation -- Nnamdi Elleh A well-researched, well-documented, and well-argued piece of scholarship. . . . Hinchman makes an important contribution to the literature on the history of art and architecture, the history of the built environment, and slavery and the slave trade in West Africa, in general, and in Senegal, in particular. -Kalala Ngalamulume, H-France -- Kalala Ngalamulume * H-France * A very convincing portrait. -Michelle Moore Apotsos, CCA Reviews -- Michelle Moore Apotsos * CCA Reviews *

A major contribution to the understanding of early modern building traditions and lifestyles in West Africa, a literature that is missing in the larger architectural body of work. Nnamdi Elleh, author of African Architecture: Evolution and Transformation --Nnamdi Elleh (03/05/2015)

A major contribution to the understanding of early modern building traditions and lifestyles in West Africa, a literature that is missing in the larger architectural body of work. --Nnamdi Elleh, author of African Architecture: Evolution and Transformation

Author Information

Mark Hinchman is an associate professor in the Design School at Taylors University, Malaysia, and a professor in the Interior Design Program at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He is the author of History of Furniture: A Global View and The Fairchild Dictionary of Interior Design.

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