I wish to thank my editor, Gordon Collier, for his guidance, comments, bon mots, and professionalism. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Patrice Petro for her support throughout the years and her suggestions on my initial proposal. I am also very grateful to Chris Bongie for his appraisal of an earlier version of Chapter 4, and to Taras Sak for his observations on a later version of the same chapter. My appreciation further extends to Peter O’Connor for his reading of a fledgling version of Chapter 3, and Etsuko Taketani for her advice and reliability in the preliminary stages of this project. Special thanks also go to Ania Pochmara for securing the rights to the Wiktor Górka illustration that graces the cover of this book. Finally, I am obliged to Takayuki Tatsumi, Yoshiko Uzawa, and the Tokyo Chapter of the American Literature Society of Japan for inviting me to introduce my research on the slave trade and theories of community (2011). Subsequently, I was given the opportunity to present some of the arguments developed in Narrating the Slave Trade at the Kansai Chapter of American Literature Society of Japan (2012), the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Montreal (2015), the Collegium for African American Research conferences in Liverpool (2015) and Málaga (2017), and on the occasion of a talk at the University of Seville (2018). Narrating the Slave Trade also includes expanded and revised versions of various publications: Chapter One is based on two essays, “The Conservative Dispositions of Roots,” Transition 122 (January 2017): 96–112, and “The Strange Career of Tamango: From Prosper Mérimée’s 1829 Novella to Its 1958 Film Adaptation,” Film International (February 2011): online. Chapter Two draws on two essays, “Political Principles and Ideologies in Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage,” Transatlantica: American Studies Journal 1 (2015): online, and “Patriotism in Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 58.3 (2017): 175–192. And Chapter Three is an extended version of “Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger: Birth and Demise of a Community,” Journal of Modern Literature 41.1 (2017): 118–136. Finally, I am beholden to my wife, Kyoko Yoshida, for her critical reading of each and every chapter, and not least importantly, her patience, encouragement, and endearment.