Bailey, Anne C(aroline) 1964–

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Bailey, Anne C(aroline) 1964–

PERSONAL: Born 1964, in Jamaica; immigrated to the United States; daughter of William and Daphne Bailey; children: Mickias Joseph. Education: Harvard University, B.A., 1986; University of Pennsylvania, M.A., 1993, Ph.D., 1998.

ADDRESSES: Office—Department of History, Spelman College, 350 Spelman Lane S.W., Atlanta, GA 30314-4399. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Educator and author. Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, instructor in history, 1998, Annenberg visiting professor of history, 1998–2000; Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, PA, professor of history, 1998–99; Spelman College, Atlanta, GA, assistant professor of history, 2000–. University of Gutenberg-Mainz, Germany, visiting professor, 2002. Coro Foundation fellow, 1986–87; Rutgers University, visiting fellow, 1998; Harvard University, W. E. B. Dubois fellow and visiting professor of history, 2000. A. C. Bailey and Associates, consultant, 1991–. New York City Board of Education, special assistant, 1987–89; Albert G. Oliver Program, executive director, 1994–96.

AWARDS, HONORS: Mellon Foundation fellow, 1995; Fulbright Research Award, 2003.

WRITINGS:

(With Edward Packard) Return to the Cave of Time (juvenile historical fiction), Bantam (New York, NY) 1985.

You Can Make a Difference: The Story of Martin Luther King, Jr. (juvenile historical fiction), illustrated by Leslie Merrill, Bantam/Doubleday (New York, NY), 1990.

African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Beyond the Silence and the Shame, Beacon Press (Boston, MA), 2005.

Contributor of articles to periodicals, including the London Evening Standard and the Jamaican Gleaner. Contributor to Relocating Postcolonialism, edited by Ato Quayson and David Goldberg, Blackwell, 2002.

WORK IN PROGRESS: A novel, Anchors in the Sand, and a book of short stories, Beyond Boundaries.

SIDELIGHTS: Anne C. Bailey is an educator, writer, and consultant who focuses on the Atlantic slave trade and other slavery issues in her research and writings. An assistant professor at Atlanta's Spelman College, Bailey is recognized as a specialist in aspects of the African diaspora, the dispersion of Africans to foreign lands). Her 2005 book, African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Beyond the Silence and the Shame, provides a different perspective on slavery, using voices of African chiefs and elders to capture memories of the slave trade. Instead of written histories, Bailey gathered oral histories for her book, captuirng the experiences of slaves as well as slave traders. African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade grew out of Bailey's 1998 Ph.D. thesis in African history, for which she did extensive field work in Ghana, Africa.

During her studies in Ghana, Bailey found that Africans felt shameful of their slave ancestors. Many changed their names to avoid such shame; a slave in the family tree was enough to disqualify a man from becoming a chief. Bailey also documents the European complicity in this trade: the English, for example, provided the slavers with over a million guns during the years of the slave trade. When the Europeans closed down their slave markets, conditions in Africa worsened: domestic African slavery grew as a result. Reviewing Bailey's book in the Nation, Daniel Lazare noted that it "is a remarkable effort to present the slave trade from a perspective very different from what we are used to—not that of slavery's liberal opponents or even of the slaves themselves but of the Africans from whose midst the slaves were taken."

Other reviewers also had praise for African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade. Writing in Booklist, Vernon Ford explained that Bailey's work provides "a fascinating perspective on slavery from the African continent." A reviewer for Publishers Weekly similarly called the book "a noteworthy, carefully researched contribution." This same writer found the text to be "a better choice for the scholar than the lay reader," but also praised Bailey for bringing "unheard historical voices to the fore." A critic for Kirkus Reviews called African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade "an ambitious attempt to determine from oral histories the effects of the slave trade on West Africa and its people." However, this writer also had reservations about the narrative, noting that "Bailey is not a graceful prose stylist." Despite such concerns, however, the same critic called Bailey's research "important, her questions provocative, and her arguments sensible." Writing in Library Journal, Robert Flatley concluded that African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade is "well written and intriguing," as well as "a speculative and highly personal account."