This volume provides an illuminating exploration of the development of early African American literature from an African diasporic perspective—in Africa, England, and the Americas. It juxtaposes analyses of writings by familiar authors like Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano with those of lesser known or examined works by writers such as David Margrett and Isabel de Olvera to explore how issues including forced migration, enslavement, authorship, and racial identity influenced early Black literary production and how theoretical frameworks like Afrofuturism and intersectionality can enrich our understanding of texts produced in this period. Chapters grouped in four sections – Limits and Liberties of Early Black Print Culture, Black Writing and Revolution, Early African American Life in Literature, and Evolutions of Early Black Literature – examine how transitions coupled with conceptions of race, the impacts of revolution, and the effects of religion shaped the trajectory of authors' lives and the production of their literature.

"This volume provides an illuminating exploration of the development of early African American literature from an African diasporic perspective-in Africa, England, and the Americas. It juxtaposes analyses of writings by familiar authors like Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano with those of lesser known or examined works by writers such as David Margrett and Isabel de Olvera to explore how issues including forced migration, enslavement, authorship, and racial identity influenced early Black literary production and how theoretical frameworks like Afrofuturism and intersectionality can enrich our understanding of texts produced in this period. Chapters grouped in four sections-Limits and Liberties of Early Black Print Culture, Black Writing and Revolution, Early African American Life in Literature, and Evolutions of Early Black Literature-examine how transitions coupled with conceptions of race, the impacts of revolution, and the effects of religion shaped the trajectory of authors' lives and the production of their literature. Rhondda Robinson Thomas is the Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature at Clemson University specializing in early African American literature. She is the author of Claiming Exodus: A Cultural History of Afro-Atlantic Identity, 1770-1903 (2013). Her essays have appeared in African American Review and American Literary History. She is a member of the Society of Early Americanists"--

This volume examines what Caribbean literature looked like before 1920 by surveying the print culture of the period. The emphasis is on narrative, including an enormous range of genres, in varying venues, and in multiple languages of the Caribbean. Essays examine lesser-known authors and writing previously marginalized as nonliterary: popular writing in newspapers and pamphlets; fiction and poetry such as romances, sentimental novels, and ballads; non-elite memoirs and letters, such as the narratives of the enslaved or the working classes, especially women. Many contributions are comparative, multilingual, and regional. Some infer the cultural presence of subaltern groups within the texts of the dominant classes. Almost all of the chapters move easily between time periods, linking texts, writers, and literary movements in ways that expand traditional notions of literary influence and canon formation. Using literary, cultural, and historical analyses, this book provides a complete re-examination of early Caribbean literature.

Race and Respectability in an Early Black Atlantic examines the means through which people of African descent embodied tenets of respectability as a coping strategy to navigate enslavement and racial oppression in the early Black Atlantic world. The term “respectability politics” refers to the way members of a minoritized population adopt the customs and manners of a dominant culture in order to gain visibility and combat negative stereotypes about their subject group. Today respectability politics can be seen in how those within and outside Black communities police the behavior of Black celebrities, critique protest movements, and celebrate accomplishments by people of African descent who break racial barriers. To study the origins of the complicated relationship between race and respectability, Cassander L. Smith shows that early American literatures reveal Black communities engaging with issues of respectability from the very beginning of the transatlantic slave trade. Concerns about character and comportment influenced the literary production of Black Atlantic communities, particularly in the long eighteenth century. Uncovering the central importance of respectability as a theme shaping the literary development of cultures throughout the early Black Atlantic, Smith illuminates the mechanics of respectability politics in a range of texts, including poetry, letters, and life writing by Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, and expatriates on the west coast of Africa in Sierra Leone. Through these early Black texts, Race and Respectability in an Early Black Atlantic considers respectability politics as a malleable strategy that has both energized and suppressed Black cultures for centuries.

Teaching Life Writing: Theory, Methodology, and Practice combines research in life writing and pedagogy to examine the role of life stories in diverse learning contexts, disciplines, and global settings. While life stories are increasingly integrated into curricula, their incorporation raises the risk of reducing them to mere historical evidence. Recognizing the importance of teaching life stories in a manner that goes beyond a surface understanding, life-writing scholars have been consistently exploring innovative pedagogical practices to engage with these stories in ways that encourage dynamic and nuanced conversations about identity, agency, authenticity, memory, and truth, as well as the potential of these narratives to instigate social change. This book assembles contributions from a diverse group of international educators, weaving together life writing research, critical reflection, and concrete pedagogical strategies. The chapters are organized around three overarching conversations: the materials, practices, and mediations involved in teaching life writing within the context of contemporary social change. The unique perspectives presented in this collection provide educators with valuable insights into effectively incorporating life stories into their teaching practices. Featuring works by over a dozen educators, the volume interlaces life writing research, critical reflection, and tangible pedagogical practices. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.

The fight for racial equality in the nineteenth century played out not only in marches and political conventions but also in the print and visual culture created and disseminated throughout the United States by African Americans. Advances in visual technologies--daguerreotypes, lithographs, cartes de visite, and steam printing presses--enabled people to see and participate in social reform movements in new ways. African American activists seized these opportunities and produced images that advanced campaigns for black rights. In this book, Aston Gonzalez charts the changing roles of African American visual artists as they helped build the world they envisioned. Understudied artists such as Robert Douglass Jr., Patrick Henry Reason, James Presley Ball, and Augustus Washington produced images to persuade viewers of the necessity for racial equality, black political leadership, and freedom from slavery. Moreover, these activist artists' networks of transatlantic patronage and travels to Europe, the Caribbean, and Africa reveal their extensive involvement in the most pressing concerns for black people in the Atlantic world. Their work demonstrates how images became central to the ways that people developed ideas about race, citizenship, and politics during the nineteenth century.