A colonial literature scholar’s diary on teaching the eighteenth century’s earliest Black published authors, and the seminar that actually landed
Taught Wheatley and Equiano back to back this week, which I do most years, but something about this particular cohort finally let the lesson land the way I’ve always wanted it to. Wheatley, first published African American author in 1773, had to have her own authorship formally verified by a panel of Boston men before anyone would believe an enslaved woman could have written poetry that good. Equiano, publishing his narrative in London in the late 1780s, had to build his entire credibility as a witness before he could even begin making his actual argument against the trade that stole him.
What Actually Made This Week’s Seminar Different
A student asked, genuinely puzzled, why either of them bothered with formal verification and credibility-building at all rather than simply writing what they knew to be true. That question, asked in good faith, gave me the opening to explain something I usually have to force into a lecture rather than let emerge naturally: for both of these writers, the mere act of being believed was the actual battle, prior to and beneath whatever argument the text itself made.
The Specific Passage That Did The Heavy Lifting
Equiano’s own account of his life before enslavement, a detail scholars still note as genuinely unusual among narratives of this kind, him establishing a full interior world and identity that existed before any of it was taken from him. That’s not incidental structure. That’s the entire argument for his own humanity, built before the reader even reaches the ship.
Why I Keep Returning To These Two Specifically
Because they represent the actual beginning of a literary tradition built under conditions designed to prevent it existing at all, and every semester I get to watch a new group of students realize that publishing itself, not merely the content published, was the radical act.
Where I Left Things At The End Of Class
Genuinely energized, the good kind of tired that comes from a seminar that actually worked the way you hoped it might. Already looking forward to teaching this same pairing again next year, hoping for another room this willing to sit with the discomfort and ask the right question.