As the story of the United States was recorded in pages written by
white historians, early-nineteenth-century African American writers
faced the task of piecing together a counterhistory: an approach to
history that would present both the necessity of and the means for
the liberation of the oppressed. In
Liberation
Historiography, John Ernest demonstrates that African Americans
created a body of writing in which the spiritual, the historical,
and the political are inextricably connected. Their literature
serves not only as historical recovery but also as historical
intervention.
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.