Abstract
In the undergraduate introductory survey of Early Modern English literature running from 800 to 1800 C.E., Volume I of The Norton Anthology of English Literature is the standard choice.1 Unfortunately, the Norton generally projects the idea that English culture is self-contained, homogeneous, and defined primarily by the writings of upper-class High Church men. To counteract this view, I emphasize that England has been repeatedly colonized by ideas from cultures outside itself, that elite literary culture is only one of the literary cultures present at any given time, and that persons marginalized or absent from the canon represented by the Norton may have had more influence in shaping English culture than many of the practitioners of High Art included in its pages. Among the colonizing influences, I put particular emphasis on what Toni Morrison, in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, has called the “real or fabricated Africanist presence.”2 While Morrison argues that the “Africanist presence” is an essential catalyst in the formation of American culture, I believe the “Africanist presence” serves a similar function in the development of English culture as well. To highlight this thesis, I focus on representations by English writers of Africans and Africa as well as on the writings of Africans published in England at the end of the eighteenth century.
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Works Cited
Carretta, Vincent, ed. Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the 18th Century. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1996.
Dabydeen, David. Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English Art. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987.
Doody, Margaret Anne. The True Story of the Novel. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1996.
Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992.
Norton Anthology of English Literature. 7th edition. M. H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt, general editors. New York and London: Norton, 2000.
Pieterse, Jan Nederveen. White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.
Scobie, Edward. Black Britannia: A History of Blacks in Britain. Chicago: Johnson Publishing, 1972.
Simms, G. O. The Book of Kells. Dublin: Colin Smythe Publishers, in association with Trinity College, 1994.
Wilson, David, ed. The Northern World: The History and Heritage of Northern Europe. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1980.
Selected Supplemental Materials to Develop the Africanist Presence in the Survey of Early Modern English Literature, 800-1800 C.E. Primary Texts
Behn, Aphra. Oroonoko. Edited by Catherine Gallagher. New York: Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2000. A Bedford Cultural edition that contains a wealth of primary materials that illuminate the slave trade, the life in the Caribbean, literary contexts, and adaptations of Behn’s novel.
Behn, Aphra. Oroonoko. Edited by Joanna Lipking. New York: Norton, 1997. Many short excerpts from contemporary discussions on the following topics: colonizers and settlers, observers of slavery, noble Africans in Europe, opinions on slavery, reactions to Behn’s novel.
Carretta, Vincent, ed. Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the 18th Century. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996. Contains full texts or excerpts from sixteen writers.
Cugoano, Quobna Ottobah. Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery. Edited by Vincent Carretta. New York: Penguin Books, 1999.
Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings. Edited by Vincent Carretta. New York: Penguin, 1995. First publication of a collection of Equiano’s letters, most of which appeared in newspapers.
Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi, ed. Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997. Contains a sampling of eighteenth-century discourse on racial categorization, an Enlightenment era project.
Felsenstein, Frank, ed. English Trader, Indian Maid: Representing Gender, Race, and Slavery in the New World: An Inkle and Yarico Reader. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. A collection of adaptations of the Inkle and Yarico story published primarily in the eighteenth century.
Ferguson, Moira. The Hart Sisters: Early African Caribbean Writers, Evangelicals, and Radicals. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993. Contains materials written by Anne Hart Gilbert and Elizabeth Hart Gilbert, women of African descent who married English Methodist ministers and lived with them in Antigua.
Hall, Kim. Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1995. An appendix contains twenty-eight poems featuring black personae or characters.
Krise, Thomas, ed. Caribbeana: An Anthology of English Literature of the West Indies 1657–1777. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Full texts by twelve writers focusing on life in the Caribbean, which inexorably centered on slavery.
Sancho, Ignatius. The Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, An African. Edited by Vincent Carretta. New York: Penguin Books, 1998.
Stedman, John Gabriel. Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam. Edited by Richard and Sally Price. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. A magnificent, unbowdlerized edition, complete with engravings by Blake. Focuses on maroon resistance.
Wheatley, Phillis. Poems. Edited by Julian Mason. Rev. and enlarged edition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989. Also contains Wheatley’s correspondence.
Useful Secondary Material
Bolster, W. Jeffrey. Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1997.
Doody, Margaret Anne. The True Story of the Novel. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1996.
Dabydeen, David. Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth-Century English Art. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987.
—. The Black Presence in English Literature. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985.
Ferguson, Moira. Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834. New York and London: Routledge, 1992.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. “The Trope of the Talking Book,” ch. 3. in The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988, 127–169.
Gerzina, Gretchen. Black London: Life Before Emancipation. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995.
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Hall, Kim. Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1995.
Hendricks, Margo and Patricia Parker, eds. Women, “Race” and Writing in the Early Modern Period. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. A collection of essays.
Matar, Nabil. Islam in Britain, 1558–1685. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Morrison, Toni. Playing the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992.
Pieterse, Jan Nederveen. White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.
Thornton, John. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800. 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
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© 2004 R. Victoria Arana and Lauri Ramey
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Kelly, A. (2004). Narrating the Africanist Presence in the Early Modern Survey of English Literature. In: Black British Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981134_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981134_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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