In trying to understand the origins of African American literature, I have taken what many may find to be an unusual approach. For one thing, this study is something other than a survey of major African American authors and their works, although, of course, they occupy center stage. Rather, it is an effort to investigate the historical conditions for an African American literary enterprise. It is an effort to understand why and how black women and men came to do the literary work they did, as well as why, during its more than a century of early development, such work took the various shapes it did.
This study is also unusual in that its focus reaches well beyond the careers of African American writers and their works. It locates the origins of African American literature in a historical context that includes, among other things, African and American oral traditions, European conventions, American race relations, and political activism. Examining a broad array of works by white as well as black authors, I found the origins of African American literature to be in a process in which black and white writers collaborated in the creation of what I call an “African American literary presence.” This involved developing a voice and a persona imbued with authority and standing, taking a place in larger realms of discourse in American society. Such a presence began to evolve even before there were African American writers, and it played a major role in American cultural history from colonial times to emancipation and beyond.
At the center of this process was the question of authority. We are accustomed to thinking of the African American voice as historically an excluded voice, a silenced voice. In the period surveyed here this was not the case. By no later than 1680, as a wealth of evidence indicates, some English and American audiences—black and white—had come to vest a “black” voice with a special authority that was the product of its very blackness. The modes of authority would change, of course, as would the significance of an African American voice in the larger American context. But the authoritative presence would remain a significant part of literary and cultural life.
Most important to understanding the nature of that authoritative voice, I suggest here, is an examination of the kinds of communities in which it could be asserted, what I sometimes refer to as “discursive worlds.” This has meant, above all, an approach to literary activity focusing less on texts than on the webs of interaction among African Americans and between black and white Americans that encouraged literary endeavor and provided for the discursive realms within which it took place.
As we shall see, such interactions and the exchanges they entailed were present from an early time. In chapter 1, for example, I show how traditions for an African American voice were shaped during the colonial era by English literary conventions, African and African American oral traditions, religious developments involving blacks and whites alike, and ambiguities in race relations, all interacting to create new literary forms and possibilities. And as we shall also see, the notion of “interaction” is crucial. As the evidence indicates, Africans, African Americans, British writers, and Anglo-American activists really did collaborate, sometimes quite intentionally, to create a credible black voice and to assert the authoritative possibilities for that voice in contexts far more diverse than one might expect.
A similar approach governs subsequent chapters. Chapter 2, in some ways a linchpin for this study, documents the significance of African American voices to both the Revolutionary cause and the early years of American nation-building. It was during this era that a distinctive African American literary persona began to emerge—apparent initially, and most in?uentially, in the career of Phillis Wheatley—embodying tendencies in African American voice and authority that had only begun to take shape in earlier times, establishing patterns that would remain important for almost another hundred years. It was also during this era, in the works of both black and white writers, that a distinctively African American critique of the larger society began to enter into the realm of public discourse.
Both these themes—the development of an authoritative black persona and the emergence of a distinctive black perspective on events— guide much of what comes later in the book, though, again, in differing contexts. These include, in chapters 3 and 4, contexts framed by intensifying discrimination, even movements for deportation, during the first three decades of the nineteenth century and, in chapters 5 through 8, contexts created by the rise of immediatist abolition. Though differing markedly, and posing distinctive sets of demands, each of these contexts called forth a quest for black authority—for an authoritative literary persona and a distinctive black perspective—in which a broad array of in?uences were brought to bear and a wide range of discursive interactions helped shape the personae and perspectives that ultimately emerged. This quest could entail the evangelical interactions, with their powerful celebrations of a pious black voice, that appeared early in the nineteenth century. It could entail the investigations of an African identity prompted by exclusionist movements occurring at about the same time. And it could entail the biracial experiments in literary activism inaugurated by the creation of the Liberator in the early 1830s.
The approach taken here, then, to the study of the origins of African American literature is one that investigates, above all, its sources and locates those sources in the changing historical milieu within which literary activity took place. Certainly, this approach is not intended to slight the specifically literary traditions in which African American literary activity became involved, whether those that in?uenced its development or those it helped to create. One of the focuses of this study is, in fact, the emergence of ideas of a specifically African American literary tradition— widely acknowledged—that began fairly early in the nineteenth century. Such traditions were part of that changing historical milieu. My approach might be described as essentially rhetorical, focusing as it does above all on the purposes of African American writing, on the ways in which writers sought to fulfill those purposes, and on the reasons why they may have believed that certain strategies made sense.
Again, many readers may find this approach unusual in its characterization of African American literature’s origins and its insistence on a historically authoritative African American voice. This study may also seem unusual because it presents the claim that such an authoritative voice did play a major role in the continuing social, cultural, and political processes that shaped the American nation. The authoritative voice not only gave African American writers a role in shaping debates over issues of color, slavery, and racial oppression, as one might expect. It also did much to focus American thinking on more general issues of public discourse, including processes of democratization and the nature of the public realm, from at least the middle of the eighteenth century. Focusing on modes of inclusion rather than exclusion may seem strange where the history of African American literature is concerned, but it yields evidence giving that literature a public role and significance that has rarely been noted before. It also helps to highlight and explain the anxieties that literature created beginning by no later than the Revolutionary era. These anxieties would increase throughout the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century.
There is one other sense, however, in which the approach herein to the history of African American letters might seem unusual, even disconcerting. This too grows out of its essentially historical, and rhetorical, focuses. Although I have examined a great number of texts, more than could ever be cited or discussed in the pages to follow, this is far from being, and was never intended to be, a survey of African American authors and their works. Because I focus on the discursive settings within which an African—or African American—voice played its part, the discussion tends to be as much sociological as literary. The concern is, again, to identify those processes and communities in which an African American voice could emerge and in which its creators could feel that there was an audience for it. This means, for one thing, that while textual analyses are important, they tend to be framed by discussions of context, by a focus on the changing historical milieu within which writing took place, rather than on individual works as such.
The nature of this focus is most apparent in chapter 7, in treatments of those authors and works that have attracted the most scholarly attention in our own time—Frederick Douglass’s Narrative, for instance, Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Martin Delany’s Blake—but that are put in a somewhat different framework here. The prominence of these works must be acknowledged; their importance was, and is, undeniable. Nevertheless, the focus here is much more on how these works and their creators participated in the particular discursive worlds that both shaped and were shaped by them and on what we can learn from them about those worlds.
Such an approach also accounts for what may seem to be the disproportionate attention given to several writers who I contend played an often underestimated role in helping to shape the discursive worlds in which African American literature took shape—the relatively anonymous storytellers of the eighteenth century, Phillis Wheatley in the Revolutionary era, Sarah Forten in the early years of abolition. Each helped create patterns of expression and authority that even the most prominent writers—a Douglass or a Jacobs—would continue to use, and to build on, as they created what in our own time are regarded as the major works of early African American literary history. Their role as innovators in the development of an African American literary presence gives them a place in this study that they have not often achieved in other treatments of African American literary tradition. Again, this is not to dismiss the importance of some of their now better-known contemporaries and successors. It is, rather, to give the clearest shape to a delineation of those discursive communities that I argue did most to lay the groundwork for the literary traditions whose development this study explores.
The origins of African American literature lay in a dynamic set of processes involving questions of exclusion and inclusion, authority and autonomy, national identity, republicanism, and democracy. They thus provide remarkable insight into the shaping of the American republic and to the formative in?uences on American public life. Those processes are the subject of this book.