A Companion to African American Literature

Gene Andrew Jarrett

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118651193
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Through a series of essays that explore the forms, themes, genres, historical contexts, major authors, and latest critical approaches, A Companion to African American Literature presents a comprehensive chronological overview of African American literature from the eighteenth century to the modern day

• Examines African American literature from its earliest origins, through the rise of antislavery literature in the decades leading into the Civil War, to the modern development of contemporary African American cultural media, literary aesthetics, and political ideologies
• Addresses the latest critical and scholarly approaches to African American literature
• Features essays by leading established literary scholars as well as newer voices

Part I

The Literatures of Africa, Middle Passage, Slavery, and Freedom: The Early and Antebellum Periods, c.1750–1865

1

Back to the Future: Eighteenth-Century Transatlantic Black Authors

Vincent Carretta

Writing a chapter for the Blackwell Companion to African American Literature on eighteenth-century authors who in retrospect are seen as pioneers in the development of that literature immediately poses the problems of literary authorship, national definition, and ethnic categorization. For example, how does one define “author” in this context? The term “author” here subsumes both the subject and primary source of the published account. The author may or may not also have been the writer. When the subject and writer differed, the writer was a white amanuensis, who transcribed and edited the author’s oral account, and published it as an as-told-to tale. Whenever a black author speaks through a white writer, separating their voices is always challenging and may be impossible. The original author may have had a very different agenda in relating his or her narrative than the writer had in publishing it. Different agendas may help account for what can strike contemporary readers familiar with post-1800 writings by authors of African descent as the surprising absence in some pre-1800 texts of commentary on the transatlantic slave trade or the institution of slavery.

The anachronistic term “African American” is not a category capacious enough to cover eighteenth-century English-speaking authors of African descent. Most of the eighteenth-century authors now considered pioneers of African American literature would have been very surprised to find themselves classified as such. How should one categorize authors of sub-Saharan African birth or descent like David George (1743?–1810) and Boston King (1760?–1802), who were born into slavery in what would become the United States, emancipated themselves by joining the British forces as black Loyalists during the American Revolution, were evacuated to Canada by the defeated British, and who chose to move from there to settle in Africa? Or George Liele (1751?–1825), who fled from Lowcountry South Carolina as a black Loyalist to Jamaica at the end of the war? Or James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw (1705?–1775), John Marrant (1755–1791), and Olaudah Equiano (1745?–1797), who, whether born in America or Africa, ultimately chose to live and die in England as African Britons? Or Phillis Wheatley (1753?–1784), who published in London the first book by an author of African descent, decided to become an African American, and lived only the last year of her life as a subject of the United States government?

Many of the authors would have been most surprised to find themselves now considered African American. They fled the country that denied them full citizenship to live in Britain, where, as the case of Ignatius Sancho (1729?–1780) demonstrates, the only bar to voting rights was the same property qualification whites had to meet; or in Sierra Leone, where they were self-governing; or even in Jamaica, where the extra­ordinary case of Francis Williams (1697?–1762) shows that status could supersede ethnicity in a British slave society. Down the road, we might have to turn to a consistently lower-case use of “white” and “black.” Only in the last decades of the century did people forcibly removed from Africa to undergo the Middle Passage and enslavement in the New World come to accept and gradually appropriate the trans- and supra-national social and political identity of “African” initially imposed on them by Europeans who sought to deracinate them. The indigenous people of Africa did not identify themselves as “African”: they saw themselves as Ashanti, Fante, Yoruba, or any one of a number of other ethnic groups with differing cultures, languages, religions, and political systems. Victims of the Middle Passage and their descendants increasingly styled themselves “Sons of Africa,” even if they had never been there. The transatlantic slave trade during the eighteenth century in effect created an African identity in the Americas for the millions of enslaved people who suffered the social death of the various ethnic identities they had while living in Africa.

The eighteenth-century African diaspora was not restricted to people who were forcibly extracted from Africa by Europeans, usually by means of African entrepreneurs, and taken to the Americas. Diasporic authors of the Black Atlantic also moved from one continent to another, and back and forth in many directions as they re-defined themselves several times over. For some, the Middle Passage even led back to Africa. Paradoxically, the category “African,” originally used by Europeans to erase ethnic identities, and later embraced by those upon whom it had been imposed, now enables us to discuss the range of identities available before 1800 to people of African descent. Elaborating our definitions of “African,” “transatlantic,” “diasporan,” and “American” enables us to appreciate ways that eighteenth-century texts anticipate those in the following centuries, without judging the achievements of the earlier works by the standards and expectations of later periods.

The solution to the categorical problem may lie in two fields that take us back to the future in the ways we conceive of the first generation of Black Atlantic authors. The recent expansion of the purview of African American literary studies to include English-speaking authors in the Western hemisphere beyond the territorial limits of the United States, and the development of African diasporan historical and literary studies mark a return to the eighteenth-century conceptual framework that encompassed works authored by people of sub-Saharan African descent. In both modern fields of study, authors are included by virtue of line of descent from a shared continental source, no matter how many generations removed, as well as by complexion. A more capaciously defined transatlantic diasporan approach emphasizes the role that crossing the ocean played in the conception, production, distribution, and reception of eighteenth-century Anglophone literature by people of African descent, and in the ways those authors identified themselves and were identified by others.

Attempting to trace the beginning of a canon or tradition to one text is risky, but transatlantic Anglophone-African studies offers a leading candidate, a date, and a cause in Briton Hammon’s spiritual autobiography, A Narrative of the Most Uncommon Sufferings and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, a Negro Man, published in Boston in July 1760. The transatlantic evangelical Christian movement known as the Great Awakening began in England in the 1730s and spread throughout Britain and its colonies during the following three decades. Led by John Wesley and George Whitefield, both Methodists within the Anglican Church of England, the Great Awakening provided the means, motive, and opportunity for the apparently sudden appearance of Hammon’s Narrative. The evangelicals took religion to the people, rather than waiting for the people to come to church, and they saw all levels of society, including slaves, as having a potential share in salvation. The evangelicals actively proselytized throughout the British colonies, making little distinction between blacks and whites as potential converts, and preaching the spiritual equality of all believers. Unlike Presbyterians and non-Methodist Anglicans, evangelicals were relatively equalitarian in their assignment of leadership roles: they did not require advanced levels of literacy and education. The evangelicals approved of the emotional appeal and expression of faith, and the immediacy of the born-again experience. The emphasis by Protestant Christianity in general, and the Great Awakening in particular, on direct knowledge of the Bible was the primary motive for gaining literacy. Protestantism encouraged self-examination by the faithful, and the writing of spiritual auto­biographies, both to monitor one’s own spiritual development, and to serve as a model for the belief and behavior of others. Consequently, virtually all the early publications in prose by people of African descent took the form of spiritual autobiographies that trace the transition from pagan beliefs to the Christianity shared with the authors’ British and colonial readers. White as well as black spiritual autobiographers commonly contrasted some form of physical captivity with spiritual freedom. Because evangelicalism was often perceived as critical of, if not hostile to, slavery, the long-standing belief that conversion to Christianity merited emancipation from slavery frequently underlies the emphasis on religion in the inspired black-authored religious narratives. The belief was so widespread that colonial statutes eventually denied its validity.

Briton Hammon’s 14-page Narrative illustrates many of the complexities found in early Black Atlantic writing. Like many later black works, his narrative is about captivity, liberation, and restoration. And like many contemporaneous authors, at least at some point in his life he implicitly condoned the institution of slavery, albeit not for himself. Prior to 1800, slavery was usually accepted as a long-familiar part of the social and economic hierarchy. All recorded history, including the Bible, recognized the existence of slavery. Although some people called for the amelioration of the conditions of the enslaved, very few people imagined that slavery could, or perhaps even should, be eradicated. Had Briton Hammon not been identified in the title of his Narrative as “a Negro,” nothing in his work would have assured us of his ethnic and social status. Presumably irrelevant to his narrative, that status is significant rhetorically solely because it demonstrates that the Gospel is designed for everyone, and that the ways of God can be justified to all people, regardless of complexion or status. Hammon’s Narrative is clearly intended to be exemplary for whites as well as blacks, freemen as well as slaves.

With the permission of his “master” (which could mean either owner or employer), Major-General John Winslow, Hammon sailed in 1747 from Plymouth, Massachusetts, to Jamaica and Central America to harvest logwood for making dye. He was soon captured by Caribbean Indians, and subsequently rescued from them by a Spanish captain who took him to Cuba. There, Hammon lived with the governor until he was imprisoned for more than four years for refusing to be drafted into the Spanish navy. Hammon finally escaped from Cuba by gaining passage on an English ship, whose captain refused to “deliver up any Englishman under English Colours” (emphasis in original) to the pursuing Spaniards. Hammon joined several Royal Naval vessels as a cook after he reached England. When he was discharged in London he engaged to join a slave ship sailing to Guinea, but before he was to depart for Africa he learned of a vessel bound for Boston. He quickly changed his plans and signed on the voyage to Massachusetts as a cook. Once aboard, he was providentially reunited with his former “master,” Winslow.

Although Briton Hammon’s Narrative was probably not known by any later eight­eenth-century authors of African descent, most likely because it was not published outside of Boston, it was the first of a succession of pre-1800 transatlantic spiritual autobiographies that culminated in Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself (London, 1789). Even most black-authored as-told-to criminal, or execution, narratives, such as Sketches of the Life of Joseph Mountain, a Negro, Who Was Executed at New-Haven, on the 20th Day of October, 1790, For a Rape, Committed on the 26th Day of May Last (New Haven, 1790), are formally spiritual autobiographies. Like Hammon, Mountain is, according to Sketches, a transatlantic figure who at one point served in the British Royal Navy, but unlike Hammon, Mountain is a picaro who pursues his criminal career in England and the United States. Neither Hammon’s Narrative nor Mountain’s Sketches criticizes either the transatlantic slave trade or the institution of slavery. The stories did, however, give public voices to people of African descent, even if only indirectly, and to a geographically restricted audience.

The first transatlantic African autobiographer to gain an international reputation through the transatlantic distribution of his as-told-to tale was James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw. His A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince, as Related by Himself was initially published in Bath, England, in 1772. Dedicated to the Countess of Huntingdon, Whitefield’s patron, Gronniosaw’s Narrative appeared in at least ten editions in England and America by 1800, as well as in a Welsh translation (1779) and serial publication in the American Moral and Sentimental Magazine in New York (1797). Although Hammon’s 1760 Narrative was undeniably the first publication by a transatlantic black author, the 1772 publication of Gronniosaw’s Narrative arguably marks the beginning of the Anglophone canon of autobiographies authored by former slaves of African descent.

Known to later authors, Gronniosaw’s spiritual autobiography introduced to the canon the framing comments by a white amanuensis, as well as the story of the Middle Passage, from Africa to North America via Barbados in his case. Gronniosaw’s text also introduced the trope of the talking book: when an enslaved author mistakenly believes that a white person observed reading a book is engaged in an actual conversation with the book, he or she appreciates the need to become literate to also be able to “talk” to books, especially the Bible. John Marrant, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, and Olaudah Equiano later elaborated the trope as they increasingly appropriated the Bible for the Black Atlantic canon. For example, Cugoano speaks as if he is an Old Testament prophet, and Equiano emphasizes the primary generic status of his Interesting Narrative as a spiritual autobiography by initially introducing himself to his readers with a frontispiece in which he extends an open Bible to them.

Gronniosaw’s tale is more color-conscious than Hammon’s, and less color-conscious than nineteenth-century slave narratives. Gronniosaw attributes his mistreatment during the Middle Passage to his complexion. When he moves to England as a free man and marries a white woman there, however, the only objection raised is to his marrying a poor widow. Gronniosaw’s primary interest is in demonstrating the trials and tribulations a true believer faced anywhere in the world. Like Hammon’s Narrative, Gronniosaw’s does not address the abolition of either the transatlantic slave trade or slavery.

More complicated in its treatment of slavery is the as-told-to A Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, a Black (Now Going to Preach the Gospel in Nova-Scotia), Born in New York, in North America. Taken down from his own Relation, first published in London in 1785. Unlike Gronniosaw’s Narrative, Marrant’s is a captivity narrative rather than a slave narrative because he was born free in New York and taken first to Spanish Florida and then South Carolina as a child. He experienced his spiritual rebirth when he heard Whitefield preach in Charleston. In response to his family’s opposition to his new faith, Marrant wandered into the wilderness, depending upon God to feed and protect him. An Indian hunter brought him to a Cherokee town, where he was condemned...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: The Literatures of Africa, Middle Passage, Slavery, and Freedom: The Early and Antebellum Periods, c.1750–1865
• Part II: New Negro Aesthetics, Culture, and Politics: The Modern Period, 1865–c.1940
• Part III: Reforming the Canon, Tradition, and Criticism of African American Literature: The Contemporary Period, c.1940–Present
• Name Index
• Subject Index