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Jefferson names the banjar and its origin

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Writing what became Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson describes the instrument proper to enslaved Africans as "the Banjar, which they brought hither from Africa". The sentence is doing two things at once and both are worth noticing: it is contemporary documentary evidence, from a slaveholder, that the instrument was understood in eighteenth-century Virginia to be African in origin — and it appears inside a passage of racial theorising whose purpose was not to honour the people who made it.

A node is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.

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Evidence · 1
Timeline

No dated observations are stored for this object. Atlas shows what was observed and when — it does not infer a history.

Connections · 2
Assembled narrative · 1

Assembled from 31 blocks · 1 evidence · 24 related

  1. Story
  2. Writing what became Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson describes the instrument proper to enslaved Africans as "the Banjar, which they brought hither from Africa". The sentence is doing two things at once and both are worth noticing: it is contemporary documentary evidence, from a slaveholder, that the instrument was understood in eighteenth-century Virginia to be African in origin — and it appears inside a passage of racial theorising whose purpose was not to honour the people who made it.
  3. Knowledge
  4. Banjo
  5. West Africa
  6. Jefferson names the banjar and its origin
  7. Connections
  8. Banjo
  9. West Africa
  10. European lute
  11. The Middle Passage
  12. Akonting
  13. Ngoni
  14. Blackface minstrelsy and the taking of the banjo
  15. Hans Sloane records gourd lutes in Jamaica
  16. The South Carolina Negro Act prohibits drums
  17. Jefferson names the banjar and its origin
  18. Blackface performers take up the banjo
  19. Kora
  20. Ngoni
  21. Akonting
  22. The West African drum ensemble
  23. The Middle Passage
  24. The trans-Saharan routes
  25. The trans-Saharan routes
  26. The Kru seafarers
  27. Highlife
  28. The transatlantic trade in enslaved people operates
  29. Jefferson names the banjar and its origin
  30. Evidence
  31. Jefferson identified the banjo as the instrument proper to enslaved Africans and stated that they brought it from Africa. V55 verification basis: the sentence is reproduced as it appears in retrieved secondary summaries; the text was not consulted, the Query in which it appears is not identified, and the retrieved sources differ on whether to date it to composition in 1781 or publication in 1785.
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No public Signals are attached to this object. Signals show what changed and when it was observed — never a direction or a rank.

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/atlas?object=EVT_JEFFERSON_BANJAR_1781&experience=EVT_JEFFERSON_BANJAR_1781