Lucio Antonio Bianchi is a San Antonio-born, Italian-raised doctoral researcher at Michigan State University. His journey reflects a unique blend of African American and Italian influences that shaped his journey toward a profound passion for history. In this interview, Lucio shares the story that led him to specialize in the transatlantic slave trade and its impact on pre-colonial Ghana. His crucial research seeks to amplify the agency of enslaved Africans, challenge historical narratives that have long shaped slavery perspectives, and ultimately highlight that the modern world today was built on the backs of enslaved people.
Where were you born and raised?
I was born in San Antonio, Texas, and I ended up being raised in Rome, which is thousands of miles away. The reason for this is that I was adopted at birth, so in my eyes, that never happened. My mother is from San Francisco, and my father is from Northern Italy. When they got in contact with an adoption agency, I was still in my biological mother’s belly at seven or eight months. My parents flew over to Texas the day I was born and we stayed in Texas for about a month before flying to Rome.
The reason I was raised in Rome is because my father really wanted me to be 100% Italian and have an Italian education. Thinking back, I am very thankful that I had that education. I spent most of my life in Rome and then some time in California during the summers growing up. I would spend the academic year in Rome for school, and then during the summer, three months in San Francisco with my mother’s side of the family.
What was it like growing up, not only in Rome, but with your parental influences?
That was incredibly important for me. My parents have always instilled in me the lesson that whatever I do, I can do it as long as I put my full interest in it. They were always flexible with my interests, which pretty much changed every other month. I wanted to be a pilot, then a doctor, then a lawyer, and an actor, et cetera, et cetera. No matter what I set out to do, they always supported me 100%. That is, in a very important way, why I am where I am today. They supported me throughout my time at John Cabot University and throughout changing majors three different times because I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. Once I ended up with history, they still supported me 100% and still do. I think that flexibility and freedom, while understanding that my decisions have consequences on my own life, were a major parental influence on my life.
In my environment, there were the positives of being in the eternal city surrounded by the culture, the food, and the history, which is also a part of why I am who I am now. I wanted to know everything I could about the environment around me which was through books, movies, museums, et cetera. Other positives are my education. I had the chance to learn Latin and ancient Greek when I was in high school, which are opportunities that are not really present in the US unless you do a specialized program. I think that shaped me into who I am.
Of course, there was also the negative. I am African-American, a black kid growing up in a city that has a lot of tourism and diversity, but in residential areas, the diversity was lacking in the early 2000s. When I was at school, I was often the only black kid. I was the only black kid until my sophomore year of high school. With that, there were difficulties that I faced being encountered with racism and hatred. That also shaped me into who I am now, because it taught me how to appreciate every different person and to be open to diversity and different cultural backgrounds. By experiencing the opposing end of that hate, I learned how to also deal with it and help others through it as well. I would say my environment had 50/50 positive and negative aspects–like every location. For me, it was the lack of diversity in my school.
Who was the greatest influence from your upbringing?
Besides my parents, I would have to say my elementary school teacher. Her name was Margherita, and I think that it seems almost trivial, but the fact that she taught me how to read and write and that she had so much love to give for me and all of my other friends who were classmates really shaped me into who I am today. She taught us how to study and how to be open to diversity. She also taught us how to learn with a smile about different cultures and different times.
I went to a private Catholic school, basically from first grade all the way to eighth grade. The experiences at a Catholic school are very different from those at a public school, which I didn’t experience until high school. In a way, she was our way into the open world that wasn’t morning mass or a more rigorous training in education. She gave us that freedom in her classroom to be creative and explore through knowledge. I still keep in contact with her after 24 years, and she still gives me advice. I think that was definitely my main influence growing up.
It is incredible to hear about Margherita since you are a professor now. I want to go back to your first experience at African Impact. What was that like, and where did you think your career was headed at that time?
African Impact was interesting because I didn’t necessarily go there because of my career. I went there because I was 16 and at the time, I only had experience living in Italy. Although I traveled every summer to California and I traveled all over Europe, I never lived anywhere else besides Rome. In my mind, if I didn’t go somewhere to live, at least for a summer or several months, I would be trapped in staying in Italy. I say that with caution because I know a lot of my friends love Italy and want to be there forever, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
For me, it’s different because I have a unique background coming from two parents from different places in the world. For me, I had to experience more than just Rome, or more than just my high school. So I found this program, African Impact, and was lucky enough that my parents supported me to go to the great Kruger National Park in South Africa. It was a program that lasted three months, and while in it, we were training to be conservation technicians. Our main job was to wake up very early in the morning and go on a daily drive to protect the wildlife in the great Kruger National Park. I think that experience really jump-started my life outside of Italy because I met people from all over the world, like Japan, India, the US, or Canada, and all over Europe. That internationalism really fostered in me a desire to go abroad. After this experience, I sat down with my parents and told them I wanted to finish my last 2 years of high school in the US to experience a part of who I am that I’d never experienced before. My parents were 100% supportive and so I moved to Boston because we had a family friend there.
Getting into your research, you primarily research the slave trade and its impact on pre-colonial Ghana. What is the main question you are researching, and what drew you to the topic?
I should preface by saying that my dissertation now and my research as a whole is ever-changing because of the current climate and policies of the administration. As PhD students, we need funding to do fieldwork and if the funding is not there, we have to creatively figure out how our area can be changed. At first I started off from pre-colonial Ghana and was very interested in seeing how the slave trade impacted the socio-political development of Ghanaian pre-colonial states. I was and still am very interested in that, but now the question has become bigger in a way. Now I am mainly concerned with the movement of enslaved Africans from Ghana across the Atlantic to the New World. My main question is, how could enslaved Africans who were transported against their will throughout the Atlantic world retain their agency? They retained their agency through cultural practices, so I am looking at their presence on the colonial island of Antigua, which is in the British Caribbean. Antigua in the 17th century became a British colony, which was around the same time that the sugar revolution occurred. Of course, to have sugar, you need sugar plantations. Likewise, to have sugarcane plantations, you need a large number of laborers working the land 24/7.
My main research looks at the plantation landscape itself and how the sugarcane plantations impacted the environment of this colonial island. I also look at how the spatial proximity within these plantations impacts the bonds that are formed among enslaved Africans. A lot of the research I do is through oral histories and traditions of enslaved Africans that were brought across the Atlantic. The most important aspect to me is to center the African perspective because for decades, centuries really, there’s been a bias in the archive. Everything that we know has been written down by enslavers so how do we bring the agency of the enslaved African to the forefront of our research? The only way to do that is to talk to present-day Africans or present-day creolized communities to record their oral traditions and understand how they inform us about their development throughout generations.
Can you share some of the stories and conversations that you have recorded?
I went to Ghana last summer, and I had the opportunity to talk to several elders of a kingdom that I was primarily focused on called the Kingdom of Denkyira. When I was sitting with them, they were telling me how important these oral histories are to the preservation of their culture. They shared that since their kingdom was ultimately destroyed by another larger state, the Asante Empire, the only way to retain their former strength as a society was through these oral traditions. There is a lot of pride that goes into retelling these histories. A lot of them are performances, but a lot of them are also heartfelt explanations of why the slave trade impacted Africans so much. I think that it is incredibly important for us to actually understand how the day-to-day operations, like a society in central Ghana, functioned before, during, and after the slave trade.
What is the biggest misconception you see in retelling the history of slavery?
The biggest misconception that bothers me to this day is people defending the role and impact of slavery in Africa by saying that Africans participated in the slave trade. This sentiment questions our need to victimize enslaved Africans if “their own people” participated in slavery. To that, I say that the forms of slavery between Africa and the New World, America, or the Americas, are incredibly different. In West Africa, it wasn’t the whole community that participated in slavery, it was the ruling elites. The ruling elites had the resources to participate in slavery, so they did and sold enslaved people. While in the New World, there was a slave society where labor was primarily based on slavery. West Africa, however, wasn’t like this. There were enslaved people who were working, but that wasn’t the primary export. The primary export in Ghana, for example, was gold, notenslaved people.
I think that what is also important to differentiate is that for Africans, they were not “selling their own people” because race did not play a part in indigenous African slavery at all. What played a part in African slavery was social status. You were either enslaved through capture in war, or you were enslaved because you were born into slavery, which is similar to other kinds of slave systems throughout history. If you compare the ancient Roman Empire or ancient Greece, this is the same kind of slavery that happened–it was a social status issue, and so they weren’t trading their own people. They were trading what they saw as commodities, obviously wrongfully, but that’s our modern perspective of it.
When the enslaved African arrived in the New World, he was treated as inferior because of his skin color. The New World, as a slave society, was built on the idea that if you were black, you were inferior. This is the way in which European and American enslavers kept their slaves down. Despite their best efforts, they were unsuccessful because enslaved Africans still had their agency and demonstrated this through slave rebellions and retention of African culture.
What is the greatest impact you wish to have through teaching and your research?
The greatest impact I want to see is more interest in the kind of history I do. It’s not a matter of my specific niche topic, but more a recognition of the fact that our modern world was built on the backs of enslaved people. There would have been no industrial revolution without the kind of industry or industrious work that occurred on these plantations. There would not have been a modern world without the slave trade because that is what made all of the European countries so wealthy and able to fund these industrial projects. Once the industrial revolution occurred, then slavery was not as needed as it was before–capitalism took a different turn. There was still segregation and slavery in the United States until 1865, but I think the most important fact to remember is that a lot of the modern things we take for granted now only exist because of the slave trade and its horrors.
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