Reforming the Literary Black Atlantic: Worshipful Resistance in the Transatlantic World

Early Black Atlantic literature emerged in large part due to the transatlantic evangelical revivals commonly known as the First Great Awakening. The list of early black writers whose works directly reflect the Awakening’s influence is extensive and spans nearly thirty years, from 1760 to 1789.¹ James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw’s A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, An African Prince (1772), represents the black authorship not as a region- or nation-bound curiosity, but rather as a testament to the universal power of Christian conversion. Gronniosaw’s Narrative is the first black-authored text to be sponsored by (and dedicated to) Selena Hastings, the Countess of Huntingdon. The Narrative also marks the first time the renowned British evangelicals, who would later establish themselves as the Huntingdon Connexion with Hastings as the grand patron, actively sponsored a writer of African descent.² The move from the spiritual and material support of black people to the transatlantic introduction of black authorship is essential for the emergence of Anglophonic black authorship.

While scholars consider Gronniosaw’s Narrative to be the first Anglophonic text narrated by a person of African-descent and sold throughout the British Atlantic world, I read the religious participation in 1740 of Jonathan Bryan’s slaves as a foundational moment in Black Atlantic literary history. These slaves’ public engagement in the evangelicalism of the First Great Awakening captured the attention of the South Carolina public, forging a discursive space in a transatlantic print culture consumed with ideas of spiritual and social renewal. We must address some southern slaves as influencers and active participants in the formation of a print culture that encourages an even earlier emergence of Anglophonic black authorship than scholars have recognized. Drawing from the theoretical framework posited by Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein in their edited collection of essays, Early African American Print Culture, I conclude that South Carolina planter elite Jonathan Bryan’s slaves participated in the modification of mid-eighteenth-century transatlantic evangelical print discourse.³

This reconsideration challenges extant understandings of the origins of the literary Black Atlantic. Critics rightfully identify the First Great Awakening as generating the potential for the emergence of Black Atlantic writers.⁴ But we should also consider that the writings of Briton Hammon, Jupiter Hammon, and especially Ukawsaw James Gronniosaw were only possible because people of African descent, most notably South Carolina planter Jonathan Bryan’s slaves, influenced the emergence of a literary Black Atlantic. These slaves’ participation in the evangelical community captured the attention of George Whitefield during his second American tour. In turn, Whitefield reported his excitement and wonder at these slaves’ enthusiasm back to his colleague and friend, in England, Anne Dutton. In 1743, Dutton took the opportunity at both the behest of Whitefield and the print debate regarding the Christianization of slavery circulating throughout the colonies, to publish a letter to Bryan’s slaves, praising their piety and subservience. Like Whitefield’s To the Inhabitants of Maryland, Virginia, North and South-Carolina (1740), Dutton’s A Letter to the Negroes Lately Converted to Christ in America maintained the position that slavery is compatible with Christianity. However, unlike Whitefield’s Letter, Dutton positioned slaves as readers and participants in the transatlantic epistolary print community, a shift bondspeople inspired by teaching one another how to read, engaging with the evangelicalism of the Great Awakening, and affecting the composition of Dutton’s Letter.

Dutton’s Letter opens a textual, rhetorical space for black readers and black participants, thus intervening in white-dominated, transatlantic evangelical print discourse. Current scholarship in early African American print culture reconsiders the dimensions of the discursive origins of the literary Black Atlantic. Cohen and Jordan Stein’s Early African American Print Culture challenges the relationship between “‘print,’ a technology that fixes impressions, and ‘print culture,’ a world in which print both integrates with other practices and assumes a life of its own.” For Cohen and Stein, such rigid distinctions do not hold up when studying early African American writing because of...