DJ Lee and Aaron Oforlea’s chapter approaches Coleridge from a different angle, counterposing his vision of freedom with that of the Black Loyalists who supported the English during the American Revolution. Lee and Oforlea’s titular phrase “(not)Freedom” refers to “the fragmentation, resistance, and transgression with which Black Loyalists lived,” which is exemplified in the Loyalists’ linguistic practices. Whether by mimicking the language of white Europeans or by developing a distinctive lingo that infused poetry into the language of transactions, the Loyalists demonstrated a model of freedom – (not)freedom – that was local and transitory, contextually dependent, and always precarious.

In the settler-enslaving context of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, where multiple discourse communities (politics, science, Christianity, and abolitionism) worked in tandem to signify Blackness as a distinct biological entity, Black writers crafted an alternative symbolic order that understood racialized Blackness as a socially constructed embodied experience. This chapter argues that, for thinkers like Phillis Wheatley Peters, Adam Carman, Maria Stewart, Rev. J. W. Loguen, and Harriet Jacobs, the Black body is a site of overdetermined experiences that – when studied – reveal the machinations of anti-Black sociopolitical processes. By focalizing three areas of critical interrogation – moral inversion, natural rights, and sentimentality – I show how these thinkers interrogated the West’s foundational mythologies of nation and selfhood.

This essay explores how poets respond to the re:memory project of slavery and its many refracted afterlives. Can a resurrectionary poetics stitch the ephemerality and partiality of Black pasts into a quilt of recovery? This essay suggests that Black poets join historians in employing “new methodologies that disrupt” and enlarge “conventional historical processes and methods,” to extend from Marisa Fuentes. In their ongoing turns to the past, such poets resurrect disremembered histories, demonstrating how poetry can burst past history’s (archival and methodological) boundaries to offer both new work and methods that influence public memory. In its focus on Tiana Clark’s “Conversations with Phillis Wheatley” poems in her debut collection, I Can’t Talk about the Trees without the Blood (2018), this piece examines how Clark is in conversation with Wheatley and also with scholars who engage (spiritual and theoretical) space that holds both missing and surviving historical remnants. Finally, this essay is a meditation on Black loss and longing. What’s missing in the archives of Black history is an endless series of lost and unpreserved papers and missing objects. For Black communities, “missing” is not only items that weren’t preserved in repositories; what’s missing is also archival ache and historical longing over time.

This essay sketches the field of African American literary history from the nineteenth century through two concepts I take from Henry Highland Garnet and David Walker: “faithful reflection” and the “spirit of inquiry.” It asks: What would it mean for American literature and American democracy to represent black citizens faithfully? What would faithful representation mean for racism as structure and ideology? How have black writers theorized, invoked, and used the literary as a form of critical inquiry? Garnet and others ground faithful reflection in a democratic ethos antithetical to the racial capitalism animating U.S. citizenship. The spirit of inquiry assumes the power to ask questions and seek answers, a power often denied the black citizens that literary history often treats as objects of study. It invokes the epistemological and methodological challenges black subjects and Black Studies have historically foregrounded. The history I offer here does not flow chronologically. Instead, I follow concepts that develop asynchronously across time as much as they were revised and revived over time. After grounding the essay’s framework through Garnet and Walker, I trace these complementary practices through Phillis Wheatley’s poetic imagination and literary critical responses that draw on her to visualize black literary history’s generative work.

This essay ponders how scholars can both pay attention to the specificities of racial formation in any period of what is sometimes called “American” history and also think about race at any time of that history as of our own contemporary moment. It begins by analyzing how the idea of transformable race informs late eighteenth-century American literature and how scholars have expanded our study of natural historical discourses in early America. After outlining drawbacks to this kind of tight historical focus, the essay engages how we might think about race in the antebellum United States more diachronically, as more of a piece with our own present moment. Highlighting the work of writers, artists, and scholars who are thinking about the moment of slavery and settler colonialism as our own moment, the essay turns to considering the work of William Apess alongside contemporary work of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe to enact sovereignty and to protect their land and, thus, to conjecture about what we might learn when we read what we generally call “early American literature” as literature both of its own time and our own.

This chapter considers some of the earliest writers in the Black literary tradition in order to explore the limitations of print publication. Books by James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, Phillis Wheatley, and John Marrant were funded by proslavery British evangelicals associated with Selina Hastings, the Countess of Huntingdon. As she was publishing Black authors, Huntingdon also invested huge sums in the African slave trade and enslaved dozens of people on her plantation in Georgia. I argue that Huntingdon’s patronage helps explain troubling opinions about slavery voiced by the writers she promoted, most notoriously those in Wheatley’s “On Being Brought from Africa to America.” The chapter compares books like Wheatley’s with the writings of an unknown Black writer also associated with Huntingdon: the preacher David Margrett. Huntingdon funded Margrett on a missionary trip to Georgia but fired him after he gave a radical antislavery sermon declaring that “God will deliver his own people from slavery.” Margrett’s sermon survives only in private letters written by white people who sought to silence him. Comparing Margrett’s unpublished sermon with the books Huntingdon promoted illuminates the pressures Black authors strategically faced when they argued for their humanity in a medium controlled by white patrons.

This chapter proposes that if scholars accepted the idea that authorship was but one form of creative contribution among many to the production of literary texts, our recognition of the breadth, impact, and influence of African Americans in all kinds of presumptive white literary production would allow us to expand the category “African American literature” considerably. Book history offers empirical and conceptual measures for conceiving “African American literature” as (1) texts read or consumed by African Americans, (2) texts that are about African Americans or that represent the experiences of African Americans, (3) texts to which African Americans deployed trades or skills (such as engraving, typesetting, bookkeeping, shipping) that may not bear the dignity of creative genius, or (4) texts that are edited by African Americans – in addition to and overlapping with (5) the more familiar conception of “African American literature” as texts authored by African Americans. Drawing examples from Phillis Wheatley’s Poems, Frederick Douglass’s Paper, and The Prodigal Daughter with illustrations by the enslaved Peter Fleet, this essay does not dispute the historical significance of African American literary and textual production so much as to think historically and theoretically about why authorship has been such a prominent part of that significance.

This chapter explores how transatlantic Black authors responded to transitional British national identity in the decades surrounding the American Revolution. It examines some of the conflicting discursive and cultural elements of African, American, and British identities as each of these emerged in new forms during the mid- to late eighteenth century. Examining evangelical and political work by Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, Phillis Wheatley and Ottobah Cugoano, it emphasizes sensitivity to the prevalence of “Britishness” in the construction of early “African American” narratives of identity and belonging. While the “middle passage” loomed large as the most traumatic transatlantic migration in the eighteenth-century African American literary tradition, moving from west to east also generated considerable economic, social, and political anxieties and prompted a range of intellectual responses. As they would in the nineteenth century, many Black writers in America saw Britain as a beacon of liberty, Christian morality, and fairness. When they arrived, they often found that the reality did not match their expectations. This chapter therefore examines Black intellectual responses to, and constructions of, British national identity narratives during decades of significant transition.

Between 1750 and 1800, writers of African descent drew on oral and written traditions to create literature that expressed their desires for freedom, equality, and a future for themselves and their children. Moved and shaped by transitional events ranging from the forced migration of millions of Africans to enslavement in the Americas to revolutions that shook and transformed the British colonies, Saint-Domingue, and France, they developed cultural productions that articulated their longings, supported their communities, and impacted the rapidly shifting sociopolitical environments in which they lived. Like Phillis Wheatley, who publicly declared her impatience of oppression in a letter to Rev. Samson Occum on the eve of the American Revolution, they were compelled to resist enslavement, choose their own racial affiliations, and assert their agency by writing themselves into the metanarratives that marginalized or omitted them.

The book’s final chapter, on the work of Phyllis Wheatley, considers the aesthetics and politics of imitation. Wheatley’s poems both enact and challenge assimilation, by performing a form of Christian whiteness and decorum through acts of imitation for which she has been repeatedly criticised by contemporary readers. But notes of resistance can be heard in her images of chains, oceanic voyages and flight from earthly constraint. Wheatley’s poems transform constraint into ornament, but in a way that ironises her own experiences of capture and enslavement. This introduces a productive incompatibility between the prevailing aesthetic and the experience of bondage that must be overcome if the poem can be written. The chapter argues against contemporary readings of Wheatley as only a ‘sickly little black girl’, for whom whiteness itself was a constraint, and shows how she manages with limited means to particularise dominant poetic traditions to her own experience of enslavement and the Middle Passage.

This chapter scrutinizes early frontispieces contained within books by Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano and then proceeds to examine the illustrated antislavery books of Moses Roper and Henry Bibb (both of which also contain frontispieces as well as other types of illustrations). Although Roper’s book was published in 1837 and Bibb’s in 1849, this chapter argues that both men (being born in 1815 and having participated in the antislavery movement) were responding to the abject treatment of the enslaved in earlier antislavery materials. The words of the text interact with its visual optic to interpellate the reader and envision a figurative mode of agency and self-possession for the enslaved body and the freed Black subject. The chapter concludes with a forward glance at artworks by Kara Walker and Glen Ligon that also attempt to excavate (although in a more abstract way) the trace of a resistant visual tradition within African American literature and US visual culture.

Although scholarship on anti-lynching literature generally is robust, most focuses on prose and drama. In parallel, although increasing attention is being devoted to turn-of-the-century poetry, this discourse still often diminishes women’s contributions to this oeuvre by denigrating the aesthetic qualities and political intentions of most female poets in this period other than Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Addressing both gaps, this chapter examines anti-lynching verse by three undeservedly little-known authors: Priscilla Jane Thompson (1871–1942), Katherine Davis Chapman Tillman (1870–1922), and Lizelia Augusta Jenkins Moorer (1868–1936). All have been nearly ignored, except for discussions of their dialect poetry. Yet close attention to examples of their formalist verse demonstrates that these poets were not anomalies in their era and instead constituted a key link in a tradition of Black women’s poetics of protest, traceable to Harper and to Phillis Wheatley before her. Ultimately, their poems on this subject offer a new lens on this decade, often unfairly viewed as a pre-Harlem fallow period in African American women’s poetry and political contributions.