A Black Manifesto: Ottobah Cugoano's Radical Romanticism

Abstract

This essay engages with the prophetic language of Black British abolitionist Quobna Ottobah Cugoano (1757–c. 1801) as he condemns the humanitarian abuses of the transatlantic slave trade. By examining the abolitionist polemic Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1787), I assert that Cugoano's radical rejection of racial categories models a new way for British Romanticism to account for the broader contribution of Black writers beyond the limits of slavery. By invoking the genealogical theory of monogenesis, Cugoano normalizes Black identity as an expression of shared universal humanity.

In his antislavery work Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1787), the Black-British writer Quobna Ottobah Cugoano (1757–c. 1801) sounds this clarion call for equality in England: "Wherefore we may justly infer, as there are no inferior species, but all of one blood and of one nature, that there does not inferiority subsist, or depend on their color, features, or form."¹ As an abolitionist, Cugoano's call for an end to slavery and the commodification(s) of Black bodies should be expected. But what is especially striking about his particular notion of a post-slavery Atlantic is the reason of genetic universality—monogenesis. He declares that human beings all share "one blood" and descend from "one nature," irrespective of "color," "feature," or "form." What Cugoano outlines here is the opportunity to reimagine Blackness as something universal and egalitarian in scope—a radical new vision for Black identity moving forward. Indeed, Cugoano's approach reflects a critical concern located within Romantic criticism today. Namely, the challenge of understanding the role of abolition as a constitutive part of many eighteenth-century narratives about Black identity while, at the same time, moving beyond reading the Black writer as solely connected to discussions of slavery.

For this reason, I find Cugoano useful when thinking about how to reimagine the contours of race and Blackness in Romanticism. On the one hand, he offers a compelling critique of chattel slavery, one that explores how British colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade constructed racial categories that labeled Blacks as inferior. On the other hand, he employs the rhetoric of autobiography to imagine a world beyond the slave trade in which Afro-Caribbean peoples can achieve citizenship as participants in British society. His writing grapples with the need for Africans to define themselves outside a strictly racial context of enslavement and forced labor. In this essay, I argue that British Romanticism is radical when it accounts for this egalitarian vision articulated by eighteenth-century Black writers like Cugoano who demand to live in a world in which Black identity is appreciated more fully for its multidimensional depth beyond slavery. Cugoano's call for the radical normalization of Black experiences is what models Romanticism to embrace new horizons around a more comprehensive understanding of Black identity.

Unlike the autobiographical accounts of other Black Atlantic authors from the period, such as Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789) and Mary Prince's History of Mary Prince (1831), Cugoano's Thoughts and Sentiments rejects racial categories in order to contextualize the slave trade within a larger discussion about the human species. His essay embodies what Lisa Lowe explicates as a "genre of liberty" written in the "perpetual present tense" that references the slave trade to evince a greater message about the ongoing pursuit of individual rights.² The polemic's title is unique for the noticeable lack of reference to Cugoano himself (in stark contrast to Equiano and Prince whose full names appear in their respective titles). By eschewing self-reference, Cugoano's work is a departure from the technique(s) of autobiographical self-authorization popularized by his Black counterparts. In effect, his reference to the human species at large (as opposed to a particularized racial category) shows that he rejects the use of race altogether as a viable metric for self-liberation. Cugoano's radical concept necessitates that one understands freedom as a universal matter of personal identity rather than a racial term determined by the query of Black liberty and the slavery-oriented emancipation of the Black body.

In a signature moment of Cugoano's Thoughts and Sentiments, he makes a powerful proclamation about the nature of his own identity. Throughout the text, he wrestles with the question of what makes a name and how to understand the different dimensions of Black identity using the idea of self-naming, coming to the conclusion that self-identifying as Christian transcends all other elements of his heritage:

And Christianity does not require that we should be deprived of our own personal name, or

the name of our ancestors; but it may very fitly add another name unto us, Christian, or one anointed. And it may as well be answered so to that question in the English liturgy, what is your name? – A Christian.

(110)

In this passage, Cugoano explains that he has two identities—a "personal name" (John Stuart) and the "name of [his] ancestors" (Ottobah Cugoano). given that Stuart is also his baptismal name, Cugoano's view of identity is multilayered. He acknowledges the binomial identification of his cultural heritage—a Black British citizen who inhabits two worlds. But Cugoano's reference to his Christian self adds yet another layer to his self-understanding—one that transcends both race and nationality. While Cugoano does this to affirm his Christian faith as an essential component of his self-determination, I believe he accomplishes an even greater goal in the process. He demonstrates through example how one achieves the revolutionary state of a re-imagined identity without abdicating the racial or geographic dimensions of his heritage. Indeed, his radical vision for his self-definition reflects some of the greatest aims within Romanticism, including the sustained capacity to re-invent oneself to meet the demands of a new time.

And yet, Cugoano's religious conversion via enslavement leaves us with a complicated paradox that actually informs his radical claims. As Jeffrey gunn argues, Cugoano had to confront the apologist belief held by proslavery Christians that "black skin" represented the "biblical curse" of a direct lineage stemming from the Old Testament figures, Cain and Ham.³ As a formerly enslaved African, Cugoano's radical call for equality also entails exposing the hypocritical paradox of Christians either defending or tolerating the slave trade. He understands the inherent contradiction of those who identify as Christian but refuse to condemn the slave trade as an unchristian enterprise. As a result, Cugoano's own religious conversion via enslavement adds additional weight to his abolitionist argument. By reclaiming the term "Christian" from proslavery apologists and re-defining it outside a racial paradigm, Cugoano highlights the way proslavery Christians have failed to live up to their own moralistic virtues by refusing to recognize the slave trade as a clear violation of human equality. In effect, Cugoano's radicalism emerges from an overt willingness to expose such contradictions and envision a new way to embrace the Christian faith.

Cugoano's understanding of what it means to be Christian extends as well to his engagement(s) as a theologian. His attachment to Christian theology within the work revolves around the role of faith in god as a means to see that slavery is ethically and categorically immoral. In his work, Cugoano cites important sections from the New Testament that emphasize god's law(s) of unconditional love: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul … and thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," from Matthew 22:37 (50). Here, Cugoano claims that "the whole law of god is founded upon love," therefore reaffirming the Bible's gospel of reciprocal love and common ancestry (50). Likewise, when Cugoano's attention turns toward those who support the African slave trade, he unapologetically invokes passages meant to hold slaveholders accountable for any transgressions: "And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise" (52). Taken from Matthew 7:12, this excerpt expresses Cugoano's belief in "the just law of god [which requires] the equal retaliation and restoration for every injury that men may do to others" (52). While love for one's neighbor is required, those who subvert the capacity for that love, most notably the Christian supporters of the slave trade, deserve equal punishment in the eyes of god.

Stephen Best and Saidiya Hartman explain that excerpts like these embody Cugoano's "redress as a Christian mourner" in which he applies the language of Black suffering and Black grief to condemn the slave trade and subsequently achieve justice.⁴ As a result, restoration can only be achieved if readers empathize with Cugoano's "black grief" and choose redemption for any crimes committed against the African people (2). While I agree with Best and Hartman that Cugoano employs a language of empathy to make his humanitarian appeal, I disagree that Cugoano's appeal is an expression of "black grief" or "black suffering." given that Cugoano fundamentally rejects racial identity in favor of a more inclusive monogenetic concept of humanity, his "act of lamentation" (as Best and Hartman write) is not one of Black grief at all, but rather human grief.⁵ I would argue that this distinction is significant, largely due to Cugoano's motive to not be viewed as just a formerly enslaved African, but rather as human. Indeed, the title of Thoughts of Sentiments, which itself refers to the slavery and commerce of the human species, is evidence of Cugoano's broader concerns for the collective grief of all humanity. The matter of whether Black people experience "suffering" at the hands of the slave trade is unquestionable. But Cugoano is rendering this suffering in universal terms by suggesting that the pain felt by Black people is not unique to their Blackness, but is rather an expression of human suffering going back to Adam. This is precisely why his passages about unconditional love and punishment are so significant. Cugoano hopes to recast the whole argument around human ethics from white vs. Black to human vs. inhuman. He extrapolates from the "laws of god" a series of moral precepts that outline how all human beings should treat each other—regardless of race—with common humanity at the core. Following god's law includes adhering to the principles of equal rights, loving one's neighbor, punishing those who disobey god, and holding a principled resistance to meaningless retaliation out of selfish personal revenge.⁶ For Cugoano, shared humanity is what binds us together as a species and will ensure that all humans achieve personal liberty.

While his critique of the transatlantic slave trade constitutes a larger pursuit for Black liberation in the Anglo-Atlantic, Cugoano was not bound by the notion that his voice mattered only in the greater context of slavery.⁷ For example, Thoughts and Sentiments provides readers of Cugoano a window into a critically understudied aspect of his polemic—the focus on economics. Often overlooked is his critique of capitalism and its abuse of English working-class citizens, who he saw as suffering a similar kind of enslavement comparable to Africans. In his criticism of slavery's capitalistic incentives, Cugoano states that rampant labor exploitation in the West Indies results in the "industrious poor … screwed down to work for nothing, but only barely to live" (103). He advocates for fair wages in addition to Black liberty and emancipation, arguing that "every civilized nation, where they boast of liberty" should be prepared to provide "general and useful employment … for every industrious man or woman" (103). In his mind, paid labor, not slavery, is the key to a wealthy nation. He notes that "employing thousands and millions of people … in a great measure would prevent thieves and robbers, and the labour of many would soon enrich a nation" (103). To reinforce this point, he says that "those employed by the general community should only have their maintenance either given or estimated in money" (103). In effect, Cugoano was an outspoken proponent of wage labor as a way to not only treat workers with dignity and respect but also enrich the material wealth of the nation. He saw the British poor and enslaved Africans as identical in their shared pursuit for greater equality, a living wage, and a working communal life, thus reaffirming Cugoano's broader concern for a more inclusive transcontinental freedom that goes beyond race itself.

Aside from how we read eighteenth-century Black writing, I would also challenge Romanticists to contextualize Black Atlantic authors alongside their British Romantic counterparts. Recent scholarly work on race and Blackness in Romanticism tends to fall into two groups: 1) Black Atlantic scholarship that examines writers such as Ottobah Cugoano, Ignatius Sancho, Olaudah Equiano, and Mary Prince; 2) Romantic scholarship that addresses how British Romantic poets viewed and understood Blackness, race, and slavery.⁸ While these two major groups are equally important for understanding the evolution of race and Blackness, they rarely go beyond the immediacy of the slave trade when discussing the role of Black identity. However, there is much room for critical interventions that compare both categories, but that go beyond the slave trade. For example, Cugoano's views on monogenesis and matters of the human can be read alongside Mary Shelley's approach to ancestry and the human in Frankenstein. There has currently been much work done in two distinct camps of critical race studies regarding Frankenstein; namely, scholarship on Frankenstein that reads the novel as a "neo-slave narrative" and scholarship that specifically views the Creature as "Black."⁹ These two critical modes, while quite different, both require readings of the novel that racialize certain characters. I believe there are other ways to situate the major Romantics in direct conversation with Black Atlantic writers that avoid a reading based on racialization or a literary interpretation rooted in slavery. Finding these parallels will be essential to institutionalizing the Black Atlantic as a regular dimension of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century British culture.

Much like Cugoano's Thoughts and Sentiments, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein problematizes ancestry and human ethics by probing the Creature's self-understanding of his rightful place in the world. While Cugoano uses monogenesis to rationalize his humanity, the Creature also references common ancestry (in connection to Milton's Paradise Lost) to convince Victor of his own humanity, rationality, and ethics:

Oh, Frankenstein, be not equitable to every other, and trample upon me alone, to whom thy justice, and even thy clemency and affection, is most due. Remember, that I am thy creature: I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am … excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.¹⁰

Like Cugoano, the Creature engages in a convincing plea for his humanity, describing himself to Victor as "thy creature" and "thy Adam." By referring to Adam's relationship with god from Paradise Lost, I would argue that the Creature envisions a kinship of oneness similar to that of Cugoano who also sees himself as materially no different than his white readers. Both individuals demand empathy from those who listen to their stories, and both subscribe to the notion that they have been wrongfully driven out from the Paradise of equality. The Creature self-references his "exclusion" from Heaven and status as a "fallen angel," echoing the same exclusion of difference Cugoano identifies in his narrative. While it is clear that the Creature is thinking quite explicitly about Milton's Satan in the passage, one should be aware that Cugoano also relies on the figure of Adam as a symbol of humanity's monogenetic origin(s).

Cugoano references humankind's monogenetic origins when he explains that every nation, regardless of geography or ethnicity, originates from a singular source. He claims that "god who made the world, hath made of one blood all the nations of men that dwell on all the face of the earth," a statement that highlights Cugoano's conviction that all humans are fundamentally the same (29). His use of the phrase "one blood" is especially significant because blood is the biological fluid used to measure life and trace genetic heritage. To Cugoano it is a marker of common humanity—a signifier of shared genetic history, one that predates racial categories altogether. He and the Creature are making the case that differences, distinctions, and demarcations are not relevant to the broader question of what it means to be a human being. The Creature's invocation of Adam as a symbol of humanity's connection to god complements Cugoano's conviction that monogenesis proves that the human species, regardless of skin complexion, is a direct descendant of god. Thus, both argue they are entitled to basic human rights irrespective of the individual circumstances or sources of their "misery." When the Creature requests that Victor now accept him as an equal to "again be virtuous," he, like Cugoano, declares his fundamental virtuousness.

I began this essay with Quobna Ottobah Cugoano because I believe his narrative represents a future for conversations about race and Blackness in Romanticism that transcend the usual discussions about slavery. In many ways, reading the "Black" author as something more than a purely racial subject makes sense given that Romanticism demands that we envision a new set of possibilities going forward related to freedom(s) in the world. As Matt Sandler argues in The Black Romantic Revolution (2020), Black Romantics of the United States viewed the abolition of slavery as a turning point that could invite new ways of reimagining Black radical culture in America. The same is true for Black British authors of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Their writings about slavery are predicated on the belief that a world beyond slavery exists for them to embrace. Their works show the revolutionary power of Romanticism rests in its fundamental capacity for reinvention and reconstitution. I believe such power should be expressed through a renewed scholarly commitment to the study of race and Blackness, one that interrogates these concepts not as additives to an ongoing conversation, but rather as irreplaceable components of Romantic discourse. Cugoano's radical call for redefining how we engage Black writers beyond the realm of race represents a new possibility for understanding how our own discipline should engage them in the future. One that acknowledges how our contemporary multiracial context demands scholarly inquiry that investigates Blackness as increasingly multidimensional. In the end, the future of Romantic discourse relies upon a more capacious interpretation of Blackness that transcends the labels of race and abolition in order to better assess the broader contributions of the Black writer to the field.