Liberation Historiography : African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794-1861.
Title:
Liberation Historiography : African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794-1861.
Author:
Ernest, John.
ISBN:
9780807863534
Personal Author:
Physical Description:
1 online resource (442 pages)
Contents:
Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Between Record and Argument: The Cultural Dynamics of African American History -- Liberation Theology and Liberation Historiography -- Gathering the Fragments: An Overview -- Notes -- 1. The Theater of History -- ''To Publish Our Thoughts'': The Textuality of History -- ''A Mixed Race'': Gathering the Community -- ''A Just View of Our Origin'': Africa and the Recovery of History -- ''A Nation within a Nation'': The Black Center of White Nationalist History -- Notes -- 2. Scattered Lives, Scattered Documents: Writing Liberation History -- Lewis's Light and Truth: Compilation and the Narrative of Destiny -- Martin R. Delany: Destiny's Architect -- William C. Nell: Sites of Memory and Liberation Historiography -- Notes -- 3. Multiple Lives and Lost Narratives: (Auto)Biography as History -- Interesting Facts and Embodied Histories -- ''Formulated Theories and Preconceptions'': The White Narration of Black Life -- The Master Narrative and the Silence of History -- The Community of History and the Site of Liberation -- Autobiography as Liberation Historiography: Samuel Ringgold Ward -- Notes -- 4. The Assembly of History: Orations and Conventions -- ''Orations Worthy the Name'': History and the Occasions of Eloquence -- White Officers and the Tower of Babel: The Work of the National Convention Movement -- Notes -- 5. Our Warfare Lies in the Field of Thought: The African American Press and the Work of History -- ''The Principle of Combination'': Periodical History -- Speaking ''Anglo-Africanwise'': Periodicals and the Black Historical Community -- The Gallery of History: The Anglo-African Monthly -- Notes -- Epilogue: William Wells Brown and the Performance of History -- Notes -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E-F -- G -- H-J -- K-M -- N-P -- P-R -- S-T -- V-W -- Y-Z.
Abstract:
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.
Local Note:
Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2017. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.
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