In Unchained Voices, Vincent Carretta has assembled the most
comprehensive anthology ever published of writings by
eighteenth-century people of African descent, enabling many of
these authors to be heard for the first time in two centuries.
Their writings reflect the surprisingly diverse experiences of
blacks on both sides of the Atlantic-America, Britain, the West
Indies, and Africa-between 1760 and 1798. Letters, poems, captivity
narratives, petitions, criminal autobiographies, economic
treatises, travel accounts, and antislavery arguments were produced
during a time of various and changing political and religious
loyalties. Although the theme of liberation from physical or
spiritual captivity runs throughout the collection, freedom also
clearly led to hardship and disappointment for a number of these
authors. Briton Hammon, James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, John
Marrant, Ignatius Sancho, Ottobah Cugoano, and Olaudah Equiano told
their stories as Afro-Britons who recognized the sovereignty of
George III; Johnson Green, Belinda, Benjamin Banneker, and Venture
Smith spoke and wrote as African Americans n the United States;
Phillis Wheatley, initially an Afro-British poet, later chose an
African American identity; Francis Williams and George Liele wrote
in Jamaica; David George and Boston King, having served with the
British forces in the American Revolution and later lived in
Canada, composed their narratives as British subjects in the newly
established settlement in Sierra Leone, Africa. In his
introduction, Carretta reconstructs the historical and cultural
context of the works, emphasizing the constraints of the
eighteenth-century genres under which these authors wrote. The
texts and annotations are based on extensive research in both
published and manuscript holdings of archives in the United States
and the United Kingdom. Appropriate for undergraduates as well as
for scholars, Unchained Voices gives a clear sense of the major
literary and cultural issues at the heart of African literature
written in English.
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