Dr. Edda Fields-Black
Dr. Edda L. Fields-Black is a direct descendant of a formerly enslaved man who liberated himself after the Battle of Port Royal, joined the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers (34th Regiment USCT), and fought in the Combahee River Raid and Africans enslaved on rice plantations in Colleton County, SC. Since an early age, she has been curious about her grandparents “peculiar” speech patterns. Her mother’s historical and genealogical research was her first inkling of Gullah as both a rich language and culture with its peculiar history. Her desire to reclaim her family’s history and culture has taken her to the rice fields of Sierra Leone and Republic of Guinea in West Africa, South Carolina and Georgia.
Fields-Black is a specialist in the transnational history of West Africa rice, peasant farmers in the pre-colonial Upper Guinea coast and enslaved laborers on antebellum Lowcountry South Carolina and Georgia rice plantations. She is author of Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora and co-editor of Rice: Global Networks and New Histories. She is executive producer and librettist of “Unburied, Unmourned, Unmarked: Requiem for Rice” (with three-time EMMY™ Award-winning classical music composer, John Wineglass). Fields-Black has worked as a consultant at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the International African American Museum, and the Senator John Heinz History Center. She and her family live in Pittsburgh, where she teaches history at Carnegie Mellon University.
Major Works
COMBEE: Harriet Tubman,
the Combahee River Raid,
and Black Freedom during
the Civil War
Fields-Black’s new book offers the fullest account to date of Tubman’s Civil War service. This narrative history tells the untold story of the Combahee River Raid from the perspective of Tubman and the enslaved people she helped to free based on new sources not previously used by historians, as well as new interpretations of sources familiar to Tubman’s biographers.
Requiem For Rice
Dr. Fields-Black is executive producer and librettist of “Unburied, Unmourned, Unmarked: Requiem for Rice,” a contemporary classical and multimedia symphonic work and the first symphonic work about slavery on rice plantations. The symphonic work first places the listener below decks of a slave ship making the atrocious journey from West Africa to America.
Deep Roots:
Rice Farmers in West Africa
and the African Diaspora
Fields-Black’s first monograph Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora uses a unique blend of interdisciplinary sources and methods to chronicle the development of tidal rice-growing technology by the inhabitants of the West African Rice Coast region, the region where the majority of captives disembarking in South Carolina and Georgia originated.
Rice:
Global Networks
and New Histories
Rice is a first step toward a history of rice and its place in capitalism from global and comparative perspectives. Fields-Black is a co-author of Rice: Global Networks and New Histories with Francesca Bray, Peter Coclanis, and Dagmar Schafer), which was awarded the Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2015.