The late eighteenth century witnessed an influx of black women
to the slave-trading ports of the American Northeast. The formation
of an early African American community, bound together by shared
experiences and spiritual values, owed much to these women's
voices. The significance of their writings would be profound for
all African Americans' sense of their own identity as a people.
Katherine Clay Bassard's book is the first detailed account of
pre-Emancipation writings from the period of 1760 to 1863, in light
of a developing African American religious culture and emerging
free black communities. Her study--which examines the relationship
among race, culture, and community--focuses on four women: the poet
Phillis Wheatley and poet and essayist Ann Plato, both
Congregationalists; and the itinerant preacher Jarena Lee, and
Shaker eldress Rebecca Cox Jackson, who, with Lee, had connections
with African Methodism.
Together, these women drew on what Bassard calls a "spirituals
matrix," which transformed existing literary genres to accommodate
the spiritual music and sacred rituals tied to the African
diaspora. Bassard's important illumination of these writers
resurrects their path-breaking work. They were cocreators, with all
black women who followed, of African American intellectual
life.
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