Michael Gomez’s book Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South<\/em> discusses the transatlantic slave trade and how individuals from various parts of Africa were reduced to one identity in the South of the United States. One of the ideas that Gomez proves is when he shows that there is a connection between the African communities in America and their origins in Africa. The African communities had no choice but to sacrifice their individuality to only be generalized in America. Gomez shows how politics, social interactions, and religions changed for enslaved people. The main argument in Michael Gomez’s book is despite being \u201cerased,\u201d past cultures can be identified through culture and social interactions.
\nThe idea of seeing past societies in the American slave culture is shown in \u201cChapter Five.\u201d The idea of communities is very apparent throughout the chapter. In the beginning, Gomez talks about the people in the Sierra Leone and Gold Coast areas. The author gives a background about their cultures and societies in order to understand the enslaved people’s experiences. The political structures found in their societies followed them to the other country across the ocean. One aspect that stayed within the enslaved culture was the female leadership roles. Like mentioned in \u201cChapter Six\u201d of The Atlantic Trade<\/em>, young men and children were captured and traded the most due to their health and being able to live through months at sea (Egerton et al, 199). In Gomez’s book, he argues women were captured as slaves because they had skills as farmers as well as their cultivation as mentioned by Viktoriya Shalunova<\/a>. Also, these female leadership roles are seen in the Sandogo societies (Gomez, 96). This idea is not new to just the slave trade. Generalizations of mass groups of native people have been undergoing that for centuries. One popular example is Native Americans, and despite being vastly different among one another, colonists generalized them as just the same, calling them simply as \u201cIndians\u201d. Spaniards also did this to the many different races in South America as well.<\/p>\n