Blackie, Sambo and Quasheba: linguistic processes of slave naming, ideologies and varieties

Chapter one deals with the main aspects of the slave trading system, its impacts on African development and its echoes in popular and high cultures, focusing on essays, fictional books, autobiographies and the minstrel shows. It also displays some elements about the legal definition of slaves and the Churches' official position about slavery. Chapter two provides a brief insight of the importance and the legitimacy of personal naming for various fields of study, analyzing its main structures in Western culture through fictional books by Agatha Christie and Mark Twain, through folk tales and through the very first paraphs of the Holy Bible. It then deals with African naming practices and focuses on the importance that names have in African cultures and on the common features that lay behind the imposition and the change of an African name. Finally, it ends with a brief history of the label 'Negro' and its use since the first appearance, when it was considered a 'neutral' term, to its present use. Chapter three, after dealing with the issue about who named the slaves' children, analyzes the slaves' names, their sources, the reasons behind them and the power relationship carried by such names, providing various examples for each category of names. It also studies the names that the slaves themselves secretly choose in order to maintain their identity and to resist the psychological aspect of the enslavement, showing how names were functional and fundamental for this purpose. Chapter four provides an insight of the Ball plantations, analyzing the life and the names of the slaves that worked for the Ball family for almost three centuries. It also provides the family tree of some generations of a slave family, in order to analyze the kin names. Chapter five studies the names and surnames chosen by former slaves after their emancipation in 1865, analyzing how names were used to identify onomastically with the powerful Withes and how the African heritage was rejected in order to highlight the new status of free men and women. Chapter six provides a brief analysis of what happened in more than 150 years since the Emancipation. It studies the meanings that some common African names have taken in Jamaica and then analyzes the evolution of 'Black names' during the Black power era, when African names were used to show Blacks' pride for their ancestry. It then focuses on the discrimination that African Americans still have to face and how such discriminations are often based upon their names, especially during job searches. Chapter seven offers some concluding remarks about the whole work, pointing out the main features of the phenomenon, while the Appendix contains some figures that could be useful to have a better understanding of my work.