Black Africans in the British Imagination: English Narratives of the Early Atlantic World by Cassander L. Smith (review)

Cassander Smith's Black Africans in the British Imagination constitutes a remarkable academic achievement on multiple levels. It successfully challenges mainstream perceptions of the presence and experiences of people of African descent in African American literature.

One of Smith's major arguments is that it is both erroneous and narrow-minded to commence the study of Africans in American literature from the eighteenth century. Smith argues that the chronological parameters of the genre should be pushed back and widened to include both the sixteenth and the seventh centuries. The logic she uses to arrive at this bold and unpopular position is simply that authorship as a prescription of ownership of literature is severely and unfairly restrictive (177). An equally valid—if not stronger—manifestation of African American presence in early American literature was the mediated inclusion of people of African descent. Before the eighteenth-century publications of African American writers such as Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, and others (177), Smith contends, there were the king of Guinea who, John Hawkins wrote, frustrated the English explorer's 1555–56 African voyage (29, 49); Pedro, the Cimarron leader who collaborated with Francis Drake and acted as his equal in the raid of Spanish silver mule trains in Nombre de Dios (in presentday Panama) in 1573 (61–63, 72); Lewis, the Maroon of Guadeloupe, described in the words of Catholic priest Thomas Gage in 1625 to 1737 as a shrewd trickster (92–95); the mistress of the governor of Cape Verde de Santiago, whose beauty interrupts Richard Ligon's descriptions of ethnographic features of Richard Ligon's 1657 True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (113–114); Walter Raleigh's descriptions of a female warrior nation in the Guianas (171); and others.

The chronological shifts that Smith orchestrates in this text are matched by her radical reinterpretations of older versions of historical themes of empire. She actually makes the audacious claim—for which she provides ample evidence—that while they were not the authors of literary writings before the eighteenth century, their presence intercepted and derailed the thematic directions of early writings about the Americas. Smith contends that in their writings the British were intent on vilifying Spanish and Portuguese colonizers by portraying them as the agents of the Black Legend. They were also bent on representing indigenous and enslaved peoples as helpless victims forced to appeal to the British, legitimate New World traders, for liberation. However, by including Africans in their stories, they allowed a previously ignored but very dynamic counter-narrative to emerge (42–43, 59). Smith carefully reads against the grain of the texts and discovers that runaway Africans in the Americas were in fact neither weak nor mere victims of Spanish cruelty. By their actions, they often demonstrated autonomy and resistance rather than surrender to Spanish imperial control, including enslavement (60). Smith admits that while her counter-narrative falls outside of established and mainstream accounts of the colonizing presence of the English and other Europeans in the Americas, it provides a minor but irresistible variant which widens the canons of African American literature (179). Consequently, she concludes that while whites used the imperial gaze and the imperial pen to articulate their encounter with Africans in their homeland and in the Americas, they did not have total control (132).

In a sense, the book is interdisciplinary in nature. On the one hand, it is firmly anchored in the genre of literature and employs such literary methodologies as textual analysis, filtering, and ventriloquizing. In Smith's own words, one of the major objectives, "to emphasize the way in which colonial encounters reveal language limitations" (5), is also firmly anchored in the literary domain. On the other hand, it is historical, not only its themes but in its reliance on major historical sources, whether Richard Hakluyt's Principal Narratives, Thomas Gage...