English 248 - Winter, 2011

18th Century Literature

Class Information

Instructor: Loar, Christopher
CRN: 43939
Time: T 12:10-3:00
Location: 248 Voorhies
Breadth: Earlier British

Description

English 248: Africa and Africans in the Anglophone Atlantic, 1663-1807

This course examines Africa and Africans as they appear in print and visual culture in the Anglophone world from the chartering of the Royal African Company in 1663 to the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade in 1807. The seminar will discuss varying representations of slavery, of Africans, and of Africa, investigating texts produced in the British Isles, the Caribbean, and North America. While the course will attend to portrayals of slavery and the slave trade generated by Africans, Britons, and Americans, it will also examine the way Africans (both in Africa and in diaspora, and both as writing subjects and rhetorical objects) shape emerging conceptions of race and of the human and the animal; critiques of slavery from Christian and neoclassical perspectives; new thinking about human rights and liberty; cultures of affect and sentiment in Britain, British America, and the early United States; and the uses of Sub-Saharan Africa for various tendencies in political theory.

Primary Texts listed below, to be supplemented by a course packet containing additional primary materials, possibly including

William Snelgrave, A New Account of Some Parts of Guinea and the Slave-Trade (1734)
Exceprts from John Ogilby’s Africa (1670)
Anthony Benezet, Some Historical Account of Guinea
Mungo Park's Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa: Performed in the Years 1795, 1796, and 1797
Lucy Peacock, "The Creole" (1786)
Excerpts from Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer
John Ferriar, The Prince of Angola (1788)
Essays, poems, and autobiographical writings by Samuel Johnson, Ann Yearsley, John Wesley, Granville Sharp, William Wilberforce, Hannah More, John Woolman, and others.

The course packet will also include secondary and theoretical texts, perhaps including selections from Joseph Roach, Srinivas Aravamudan, Jenny Sharpe, Paul Gilroy, Roxann Wheeler, Henry Louis Gates, and Laura Brown.

Grading

Presentations, discussion/participation, and short (15-18 page) seminar paper.

Texts

Letters, Ignatius Sancho
Obi; or, the History of Three-Fingered Jack, William Earle
Algerine Captive, Royall Tyler
Caribbeana, Krise (ed.)
Stedman's Surinam, Stedman, John
Interesting Narrative, Equiano, Olaudah
Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evils of Slavery, Cugoano
Poems, Wheatley, Phillis
Versions of Blackness: Key Texts on Slavery from the Seventeenth Century, Hughes (ed.)
--, Course Packet with Additional Readings