"Elizabeth Isichei explores the Atlantic slave trade, as reflected in the poetics of rumor and the poetics of memory - an approach different from the quantitative and demographic studies which have transformed the subject over the past twenty years.

To this and to her study of popular consciousness in the colony and postcolony, she brings together a wide range of disciplines - ethnography, art and art history, and contemporary literary theory among them - to look at the intellectual history of Africa, from African rather than European premises. The result is a history of popular consciousness which shows the experiences of ordinary people, often in protest to an ongoing experience of exploitation."--BOOK JACKET.