Chapter 8 - Respectability Politics and Early African American Literature

Summary

From the very beginning of the transatlantic slave trade and the rise of racial hierarchies, people of African descent advocated for particular forms of conduct and assimilation as a means to alleviate their oppression. As such, respectability rhetoric – discussions about Black African character and comportment – appear in the earliest literature written by and about Black Africans in the Americas. These discussions about respectability evolved over time and were shaped by sociopolitical phenomena such as European expansion into the Americas and invasive colonization, the Enlightenment Movement, the Revolutionary War, the Great Awakening, and developing racial ideologies. What is more, a preoccupation with respectability among Black Africans led to transformations in the Black life writings and poetry that first emerged in the eighteenth century and evolved into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This chapter examines the extent to which respectability as an idea and coping strategy fueled transitions in the earliest African American literature.