Chapter 12 - Black Letters Close the Eighteenth Century

Summary

This chapter argues that eighteenth-century African Atlantic authors perceived in the lives of Black people, distorted and destroyed by the slave system, a chaos that could be understood, protested, and then converted into a transition to a better Black world. The key to this understanding was Reformed Christian religion, and the guides to this transition were supposed to be religiously informed writers. Texts of early African Atlantic authors treat the changes they observed in the lives of Black people, for example, in the human body being reproduced in new sexual and labor regimes, in foods consumed in West Africa and the Americas, and in music as performed in old and new contexts. The telos of Black lives was a divinely inspired utopia, one millenarian version of which was Sierra Leone. Black authors responded to one another concerning their visions of holy goals for their people. The persistence of the slave system and new forms of racism crushed concrete efforts to create new Black societies in places like Sierra Leone. Yet textual interactions – these Black authors responding to one another – constituted the origins of the African American literary tradition. Black millenarian letters closed the eighteenth century; Black literature opened the nineteenth century.