This chapter argues that textual fluidity may be understood as a fundamental component of early Black Atlantic literature, texts orally related or written by individuals of African descent, predominately those first published before 1800. Early Black Atlantic orators and writers revised their texts for various purposes; nonauthorial subjects also regularly altered the literature for a variety of reasons. New – and needed – discoveries concerning the publishing and reception histories of early Black Atlantic literature emerge when unauthorized, posthumous, and abridged editions are studied with the same rigor as authorized editions. By employing this approach, Lamore offers fresh insights on the publishing histories of John Marrant’s, Olaudah Equiano’s, and Venture Smith’s autobiographical narratives.

This chapter describes how much of early African American literature takes shape within competing demands and analyzes how early Black writers negotiate it. Indeed, many early African American writers produced their works within a literary double bind that pressured them to be truthful, to write with the highest level of exactitude, to imitate reality precisely, and to produce perfectly mimetic texts; and at the same time, to use their imagination, to create something beautiful, and to produce an aesthetically valuable text. I explore how George Liele, David George, Boston King, and Venture Smith negotiate this literary double bind at the end of the eighteenth century, a time that saw significant historical transitions including the Zong massacre, the American Revolutionary War, the ratification of the US Constitution, and the French and Haitian Revolutions, all against the backdrop of transatlantic slavery and efforts to eradicate it. In these narratives, although white editors, amanuenses, and interlocutors claim that these texts tell the “simple truth,” each exceeds and problematizes the description that emphasizes the texts’ transparent mimetic exactitude by creatively utilizing literary structures of expression, rupturing what Christina Sharpe describes as the episteme of racial slavery.

This chapter investigates the function of a biblically-derived rhetoric of redemption in writings by turn-of-the century Black narrators who discussed slavery in the United States of America. I focus on three key texts: Venture Smith’s A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, A Native of Africa, But resident above seventy years in the United States of America (1798); George White’s A Brief Account of the Life, Experiences, Travels, and Gospel Labours of George White, An African (1810); and John Jea’s Life, History, and Unparalleled Sufferings of John Jea, The African Preacher. White and Jea infuse the account of their freedom from the bondage of sin and their subsequent regeneration in God with a riveting chronicle of their experiences both as slaves and as roving Atlantic freedmen, while Smith incorporates his experiences as a slave and a freedman within a Franklinesque account of personal fiscal successes and exploits. Operating as a principal and a vocabulary, the rhetoric of redemption enlarged possibilities for Black narratives to critique both the early practices of racial slavery and the historical character of freedom in the North American context. The word “redemption” carries theological and economic meanings that bore directly upon the historical character of (and possibilities for) Black liberation in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.