Liberation Historiography
African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794-1861
John Ernest
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Imprint: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 12/2005
Pages: 448
Subject: Literary Criticism, Social Science, History
| University of North Carolina
Print ISBN: 9.78E+12
eBook ISBN: 9780807863534
DESCRIPTION
Ernest studies various cultural forms including orations, books, pamphlets, autobiographical narratives, and black press articles. He shows how writers such as Martin R. Delany, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Jacobs crafted their texts in order to resituate their readers in a newly envisioned community of faith and moral duty. Antebellum African American historical representation, Ernest concludes, was both a reading of source material on black lives and an unreading of white nationalist history through an act of moral imagination.