Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794-1861 - Softcover

Ernest, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807855219 ISBN 13: 9780807855218

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Book Description:

"Wide-ranging in its coverage and provocative in its conclusions, Liberation Historiography represents a much-needed addition to the growing literature on black historiography."-- Journal of American History

About the Author:

John Ernest is associate professor of English at the University of New Hampshire. He is author of Resistance and Reformation in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature: Brown, Wilson, Jacobs, Delany, Douglass, and Harper and editor of three volumes of nineteenth-century African American writing.

About this edition

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0807855219
• ISBN 13: 9780807855218
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 442