Diamond, David
MWF 3 :00 PM
Park Hall 0144
“The history of the black Atlantic,” Paul Gilroy writes, “yields a course of lessons as to the instability and mutability of identities which are always unfinished, always being remade.” Few writers exemplify these processes of making and remaking as well as Charles Ignatius Sancho. Supposedly born aboard a slave ship during the Middle Passage, Sancho was enslaved on both sides of the Atlantic before self-emancipating and becoming a well-known abolitionist, composer, and grocer, as well as the first Black person to vote in a British election. His published correspondence, The Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African, is an artifact of the complex self-fashioning that Gilroy and other scholars ascribe to Black Atlantic experience. This course is an experiment in literary micro-history and an interrogation of the idea of a major author. It uses Sancho’s letters as the launch point for a broader investigation of the aesthetic, intellectual, and political parameters of early Black Atlantic writing.
We begin by analyzing the form and content of The Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, paying particular attention to the multivalent character Sancho assumes as he addresses a range of topics and people. We consider his complex negotiation of racial and national identities, his strategic oscillation between “British” and “African” identities. We examine his accounts of the American War for Independence and the Gordon Riots, asking how history changes when we view the fraught 1770s and 1780s through Sancho’s distinctive perspective. We also probe Sancho’s representativeness: what can we learn, and what can’t we learn, about eighteenth-century Black Atlantic experience, from his letters? How should we account for his relative social privilege when interpreting his work?
Next, we read what Sancho read. The Letters abound with references to well-known British authors like Alexander Pope, Sarah Scott, and Laurence Sterne. In what has been described as the first instance of literary criticism about a Black writer and by a Black writer, Sancho also appraises the verses of renowned African American poet Phillis Wheatley (Peters). We sample the work of Sancho’s intertexts in excerpt, with the primary aim of identifying the raw materials from which Sancho constructs his character, his authority, and his radical visions of futurity.
Finally, we situate Sancho within the broader tradition of early Black Atlantic literature. Our readings include texts that have become part of the “new canon” of Black Studies: among them, Wheatley Peters’s Poems on Various Subjects, Quobna Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery, Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, and Mary Prince’s History. We also consider the productions of less well-known authors, like Jupiter Hammon, James Albert Ukasaw Gronniosaw, and Robert Wedderburn. We engage with these writers on their own terms, while also perusing their texts for resonances of Sancho’s sentiments and style. Throughout the course, representative scholarship from the fields of history and literary criticism enlivens our discussions.