African American literature, body of literature written by Americans of African descent. Beginning in the pre-Revolutionary War period, African American writers have engaged in a creative, if often contentious, dialogue with American letters. The result is a literature rich in expressive subtlety and social insight, offering illuminating assessments of American identities and history. Although since 1970 African American writers, led by Toni Morrison, have earned widespread critical acclaim, this literature has been recognized internationally as well as nationally since its inception in the late 18th century.
African Americans launched their literature in North America during the second half of the 18th century, joining the war of words between England and its rebellious colonies with a special sense of mission. The earliest African American writers sought to demonstrate that the proposition “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence required that black Americans be extended the same human rights as those claimed by white Americans. Couching a social justice argument in the Christian gospel of the universal brotherhood of humanity, African-born Phillis Wheatley, enslaved in Boston, dedicated her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), the first African American book, to proving that “Negros, black as Cain,” were not inherently inferior to whites in matters of the spirit and thus could “join th’ angelic train” as spiritual equals to whites. Composing poems in a wide range of classical genres, Wheatley was determined to show by her mastery of form and metre, as well as by her pious and learned subjects, that a black poet was as capable of artistic expression as a white poet. Poems on Various Subjects provided a powerful argument against the proslavery contention that the failure of African peoples to write serious literature was proof of their intellectual inadequacies and their fitness for enslavement. The poetry and sermons of the Connecticut slave Jupiter Hammon (1711–1806?), though their major theme is the urgency of Christian conversion, buttressed the demand of early African American writers for literary recognition.
In 1789 Olaudah Equiano, Wheatley’s most famous black literary contemporary, published his two-volume autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; or, Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself. A British citizen who had experienced enslavement in the Americas, Equiano has been traditionally regarded, along with Wheatley, as the founder of African literature in English by virtue of his having pioneered the slave narrative, a firsthand literary testimony against slavery which, by the early 19th century, earned for African American literature a burgeoning readership in Britain as well as in the United States. One of the most remarkable features of Equiano’s story is his use of African origins to establish his credibility as a critic of European imperialism in Africa. Recent research, however, has raised questions about whether Equiano was born an Igbo (Ibo) in Africa, as he claims in his autobiography. His baptismal record in Westminster, England, lists him on February 9, 1759, as “Gustavus Vassa a Black born in Carolina 12 years old.” Scholars have also debated whether Equiano’s account of Igbo life in his autobiography is based on reading rather than memory. In the absence of scholarly consensus on these controversial matters, The Interesting Narrative remains a pivotal text in portraying Africa as neither morally benighted nor culturally backward but rather as a model of social harmony defiled by Euro-American greed.
In the early 19th century, the standard-bearers of African American literature spoke with heightening urgency of the need for whites to address the terrible sin of slavery. Through essays, poetry, and fiction as well as more conventional journalism, African American newspapers, inaugurated by Freedom’s Journal in 1827, extolled the achievements of black people worldwide while lobbying persistently for an end to slavery. As the prophet of literary black nationalism in the United States, David Walker wrote his incendiary Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829) to warn white America of impending racial violence if slavery were not abolished. Echoing Walker, who was a fellow Bostonian, Maria W. Stewart, the first African American woman political writer, issued her Productions of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart in 1835, in which she encouraged black women in the North to take a more outspoken role in civil rights agitation and black community building. A year after the publication of Stewart’s Productions, Jarena Lee, a domestic servant impelled by a call to preach, published The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee, the first spiritual autobiography by an African American woman.
In the wake of the bloody Nat Turner rebellion in Southampton county, Virginia, in 1831, an increasingly fervent antislavery movement in the United States sponsored firsthand autobiographical accounts of slavery by fugitives from the South in order to make abolitionists of a largely indifferent white Northern readership. From 1830 to the end of the slavery era, the fugitive slave narrative dominated the literary landscape of antebellum black America. The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845) gained the most attention, establishing Frederick Douglass as the leading African American man of letters of his time. By predicating his struggle for freedom on his solitary pursuit of literacy, education, and independence, Douglass portrayed himself as a self-made man, which appealed strongly to middle-class white Americans. In his second, revised autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Douglass depicted himself as a product of a slave community in Maryland’s Eastern Shore and explained how his struggles for independence and liberty did not end when he reached the so-called “free states” of the North. Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), the first autobiography by a formerly enslaved African American woman, candidly describes her experience of the sexual exploitation that made slavery especially oppressive for black women. Chronicling what she called “the war” of her life, which ultimately won both her own freedom and that of her two children, Jacobs proved the inadequacy of the image of victim that had been applied pervasively to female slaves. Her work and the antislavery and feminist oratory of the New York ex-slave who renamed herself Sojourner Truth enriched early African American literature with unprecedented models of female eloquence and heroism.