Overview

In an interdisciplinary study of black intellectual history at the dawn of the nineteenth century, Stefan M. Wheelock shows how black antislavery writers were able to counteract ideologies of white supremacy while fostering a sense of racial community and identity. The major figures he discusses—Ottobah Cugoano, Olaudah Equiano, David Walker, and Maria Stewart—engaged the concepts of democracy, freedom, and equality as these ideas ripened within the context of racial terror and colonial hegemony. Wheelock highlights the ways in which religious and secular versions of collective political destiny both competed and cooperated to forge a vision for a more perfect and just society. By appealing to religious sensibilities and calling for emancipation, these writers addressed slavery and its cultural bearing on the Atlantic in varied, complex, and sometimes contradictory ways during a key period in the development of Western political identity and modernity.

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9780813937984

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Reviews

"In Stefan M. Wheelock’s strikingly insightful study, the profound roots of modern black intellectual history rise through the fractured instabilities of white discourses of civilization, philosophy, and progress. This is an important study of how black writing works and why we need to place it at the center of historical research."""" — John Richard Ernest, University of Delaware, author of A Nation within a Nation: Organizing African-American Communities before the Civil War"

In Stefan M. Wheelock's strikingly insightful study, the profound roots of modern black intellectual history rise through the fractured instabilities of white discourses of civilization, philosophy, and progress. This is an important study of how black writing works and why we need to place it at the center of historical research.--John Richard Ernest, University of Delaware, author of A Nation within a Nation: Organizing African-American Communities before the Civil War

Author Information

Stefan M. Wheelock is Assistant Professor of English at George Mason University, USA.

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