Choice Reviews Online · 1997 · 238 citations · 0 references
HumanitiesHistoryLiteratureAfrican American HistoryBlack Intellectual HistoryHistoriographyAfrican American Literary StudiesBlack Atlantic StudiesBlack StudiesEighteenth-century LiteratureAfrican American AutobiographyAfrican American HistoriographyAnthology WritingAtlantic LiteratureHistories Of EnslavementManuscript Holdings CataloguingNarrative Travel AccountsTransatlantic Literary Exchange
Unchained Voices compiles the most comprehensive anthology of 18th‑century African‑descendant writings, revealing diverse experiences across the Atlantic world from 1760‑1798. Carretta introduces the collection by contextualizing the works within 18th‑century genres and drawing on extensive archival research in the United States and the United Kingdom. The anthology serves both undergraduates and scholars by illuminating the key literary and cultural issues in 18th‑century English writings by people of African descent.
In Unchained Voices, Vincent Carretta has assembled the most comprehensive anthology ever published of writings by eighteenth-century people of African descent, enabling many of these authors to be heard clearly for the first time in two centuries. Their writings reflect the surprisingly diverse experiences of blacks on both sides of the Atlantic-America, Britain, the West Indies, and Africa - between 1760 and 1798. Letters, poems, captivity narratives, petitions, criminal autobiographies, economic treatises, travel accounts, and antislavery arguments were produced during a time of various and changing political and religious loyalties. Although the theme of liberation from physical or spiritual captivity runs throughout the collection, freedom also clearly led to hardship and disappointment for a number of these authors. In his introduction, Carretta reconstructs the historical and cultural context of the works, emphasizing the constraints of the eighteenth-century genres under which these authors wrote. The texts and annotations are based on extensive research in both published and manuscript holdings of archives in the United States and the United Kingdom. Appropriate for undergraduates as well as for scholars, Unchained Voices gives a clear sense of the major literary and cultural issues at the heart of writings in English by people of African descent.