Reviews of Books

Reviewed by Philip Gould, Brown University

The literary and historical study of eighteenth-century writings by black authors is certainly on the rise. Just as often "related" to white editors as written by blacks themselves, these writings present intriguing instances of collaborative autobiography; their itinerant stories, moreover, raise critical issues about the nature of racial and cultural identities in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. How and why have these writings so quickly become part of this era's literary and historical canon? One reason is that literary critics actively have sought new works that account for difference in a scholarly field that is already familiar, for example, with Phillis Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral (London, 1773) and The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (London, 1789). Another is that historians similarly have continued to analyze the full range of experiences associated with European imperialism and the British empire, particularly the histories of the African slave trade and slavery in the Americas. The field has benefited as well from Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), which provides a theoretical model of fluid and diaspora identity for blacks like Equiano who traveled widely across the Atlantic world.	1
Over the last five years or so, publishers have made these writings available in paperback editions suitable for scholarly and classroom use. Both scholars and students can thank Vincent Carretta for his thorough work in editing new editions of the works of Wheatley and Equiano as well as those of lesser-known figures like Quabna Ottobah Cugoano and Ignatius Sancho. Several important anthologies of the black Atlantic recently have appeared as well: Adam Potkay and Sandra Burr, Black Atlantic Writers of the Eighteenth Century: Living the New Exodus in England and the Americas (New York, 1995), Carretta, Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century (Lexington, Ky., 1996), and Henry Louis Gates Jr., Pioneers of the Black Atlantic: Five Slave Narratives from the Enlightenment, 1772–1815 (Washington, D. C., 1998).	2
Critical and pedagogical interest in the early black Atlantic surely allows room for yet another anthology such as "Facing Zion Forward." Yet the two editors of this anthology, John Saillant and Joanna Brooks, preface their volume with a rather curious disclaimer: the book is supposed "to introduce to contemporary audiences a reliable modern edition of eighteenth-century black writings.... Bearing in mind the needs of scholarly and general readers, but also respecting the integrity of the original texts and the detractive effects of heavy annotations, we have chosen to restrict all scholarly and interpretive mediation to the introduction" (p. 44). One wonders whether endnotes to relatively new and unfamiliar writings actually "detract" from textual "integrity." The editors do "encourage readers to be alert to the rich intertextuality" (p. 31) of these primary works, and I can understand the absence of scholarly annotations for four of the eight texts published in this volume, which have already been edited and annotated thoroughly by Caretta and Potkay: A Narrative of the Lord's Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant (London, 1785), Marrant's A Sermon Preached on the 24th Day of June 1789, Being the Festival of St. John the Baptist (Boston, 1789), An Account of the Life of Mr. David George, from Sierra Leone in Africa (London, 1793–1797), and Memoirs of the Life of Boston King, a Black Preacher Written by Himself (London, 1798). However, the absence of any editorial work for the previously unpublished "centerpiece" (p. 35) of this volume, A Journal of the Rev. John Marrant, from August the 18th, 1785, to the 16th of March, 1790 (London, 1790), is startling.	. . .