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Pioneers Of The Black Atlantic

Five Slave Narratives, 1772-1815

Contributors

By Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Edited by William L. Andrews

Formats and Prices

Price

$25.99

Price

$33.99 CAD

Format

Trade Paperback

Format:

Trade Paperback $25.99 $33.99 CAD

This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around November 6, 1998. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

In the eighteenth century, a small group of black men met the challenge of the Enlightenment by mastering the arts and sciences and writing themselves into history. The battle lines were clear—literacy stood as the ultimate measure of humanity to the white arbiters of Western culture. If blacks could succeed in this sphere, they would prove that African and European humanity were inseparable. Without a literary record, blacks seemed predestined for slavery.The small but dedicated group—now known as the Black Atlantic writers—who stepped forward to meet this challenge published their autobiographies in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They not only defied the popular opinion of the time that blacks were unfit for letters, but inaugurated the Black American and Black British literary traditions.While slave narratives are often excerpted and anthologized, they are rarely collected in their entirety. Pioneers of the Black Atlantic is the first anthology to include the complete texts of the five most important and influential narratives of the eighteenth century. Included here are the writings of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, John Marrant, Ottobah Cugoano, Olaudah Equiano, and John Jea.Their stories, resonant still in our racially divided world, are landmarks in the history of autobiography and human rights.

On Sale
Nov 6, 1998
Page Count
656 pages
Publisher
Civitas Books
ISBN-13
9781887178983

Henry Louis Gates Jr.

About the Author

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He is the author of numerous books, including Colored People, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, In Search of Our Roots, and the American Book Award-winning The Signifying Monkey. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Learn more about this author