The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture by Grgory Pierrot;

Author:Grgory Pierrot;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2019-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

LITERACY IN BLACK

A “black print counterpublic” developed in late eighteenth-century United States, notably in a series of publications written and financed by African American authors who engaged previous texts by black authors such as Phillis Wheatley or Sons of Africa Ottobah Cugoano and Olaudah Equiano but who owed nothing to white sponsors.10 Thanks to these texts, a “corporate consciousness” rose among the free, literate black communities of the United States, predicated on the “very notion of blackness as a group condition covering diverse African peoples.”11 The appropriation of a notion of race first issued within the regime of slavery follows the same logic on display in independent Haiti’s declarations: taking over the means of self-definition was a demonstration of agency, however conceptual.

This effort spread through networks of churches—such as Richard Allen’s African Methodist Episcopal Church, with its services reserved to “our African brethren and the descendents of the African race”—or the black Prince Hall Freemasonry lodges that defined themselves in no small part by their relation to text literacy and print. African Americans used “collective venues to claim, secure, and enact for themselves the civil rights that whites under the auspices of racial privilege assumed, understood, and enjoyed as the natural provenance of the individual.”12 The Naturalization Act of 1790 and its subsequent iterations equated citizenship and whiteness, allowing only “any Alien being a free white person” to become a U.S. citizen. Some northern states offered local citizenship to propertied African Americans, but black civic life was restrained and grew only more so as local exceptions dwindled throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. By the 1820s the assault on black civil rights was widespread: the so-called Black Laws implemented in Ohio in 1807 to make black immigration into the state as difficult as possible served as a model for surrounding states to pass similar legislature so that “by 1840, some 93 per cent of the northern free black population lived in states which completely or practically excluded them from the right to vote.”13 In a country increasingly defined along racial lines, such legal decisions normalized the alienation of all people of color, including those who were free, from the national body.14 The black counterpublic offered the closest thing to civic life, then, and print seemed a venue that allowed for a semblance of participation in national debates. In effect, the values of the black print counterpublic flipped the individualistic values of the white American Republic upside down as a matter of survival. Text provided a sense of political community to those free inhabitants denied citizen status. Print also made black voices available to broader national circles at any time, in any place.

In a country whose freedom discourse found its rhetorical roots in Protestant politics and exegesis, it should come as no surprise that African American notions of literacy should be closely related to religious sentiment. African American activists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries couched their arguments in biblical rhetoric, focusing on sections referencing more or less overtly

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.