Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South

Morgan, Lynda J.; Gómez, Michael A.

doi:10.2307/525256

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“…81–82). And Afro‐Atlantic scholars like Gates and Michael Gomez (1998) have rightly stressed the importance of looking farther than civilizations that meet Western criteria of advancement for Africa's influence and value.…”

Section: Africa In Eighteenth‐century Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Atlantic approaches have seemed the most viable solution to this problem. Scholars across the disciplines have plumbed the written record for traces of Africa that might be glimpsed among the Western assimilation, the rhetoric of global Blackness that race‐based solidarity demanded, and the combining and recombining of cultural elements that became a part of the self‐perception of the captive African the moment they stepped through the door of no return onto the slave ship (Baker, 1984; Stuckey, 1987; Sobel, 1987; Gates, 1988; Gomez, 1998; Wilder, 2001; Langley, 2008; M’Baye, 2009). To offer the most canonical example from literary studies, in Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s (1988) account of “how the ‘black tradition’ had theorized about itself,” he traces one prong to Africa and another to the eighteenth‐century slave narrative.…”

Section: Africa In Eighteenth‐century Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Africa paradox: Locating Africa in eighteenth‐century studies

Mitsein

2023

Literature Compass

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This article is about why Africa is overlooked in eighteenth‐century literary studies. Africa’s neglect is not merely a problem of attention. Neither the parameters of the field nor the tools of the discipline appear particularly suited for engaging Africa as anything other than an invention of the European imagination. In what follows, I seek to bring more clarity to the origins of this paradox and to contextualize some of its governing assumptions not in order to solve it but to show that having already solved it can’t and doesn’t need to be a prerequisite for scholars of eighteenth‐century literature to face it head‐on. The first section offers a brief account of how this paradox arose from the political and intellectual matrix of the mid‐twentieth century when African Studies was first institutionalized in the West. The subsequent sections highlight the way this history has shaped—both directly and indirectly—the way scholars and teachers of eighteenth‐century literature have understood Africa and their obligations to it and suggests some ways we might begin to rethink Africa’s place in the field

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Section: Africa In Eighteenth‐century Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%