Henry Louis Gates Jr., Vincent Carretta, and Paul Edwards has pro-
vided considerable convincing evidence of a vibrant community of
eighteenth-century black writers who knew and read each other and
who shared common themes and aims. As we come to understand the
so-called Age of Enlightenment in the West also as an age of unprece-
dented slave trading among Europe, Africa, and the Western Hemi-
sphere, we realize that the struggle of African-descended people in
that era to speak truth to white power and privilege originated in a
community of unusually cosmopolitan and sophisticated people of
color. Pioneers of the Black Atlantic attests to the key role that autobi-
ography played in launching a cosmopolitan, transnational literary
tradition by African-descended writers of the eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries.

At home in a fluid and dynamic Atlantic world defined by multiple
identifications with Africa, England, and America, the writers repre-
sented in Pioneers of the Black Atlantic cannot be easily categorized as
African, African-American, or Afro-British. They were all truly men
of the world. They were social and cultural creoles-incontestably and
unashamedly black but with affinities, either by birth or experience,
to various nations, colonies, and peoples. Hardy and adaptable by vir-
tue of their wide travels in the Atlantic world, these writers seem to be
at home everywhere and nowhere. Their unwavering commitment
to Christianity, a bedrock of faith in their stormy, often perilous
lives, reminds us of the spiritual foundation on which the antislavery
movement in England and North America was built in the eighteenth
century. The literary efforts of these pioneering writers to fashion a
distinctly multicultural identity for themselves in their autobiogra-
phies resonate powerfully with our contemporary world.

Beginning in the 1770s, a handful of African-born men and women
who had grown up in England or the Americas began to contribute in
signal ways to the literature of the English-speaking world. In 1772,
James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, a sixty-year-old former slave
born in what is now Nigeria, interposed his African voice into English
autobiography, dictating the harrowing story of his life to a white
woman in the English midland town of Leominster. A Narrative of the
Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gron-
niosaw, an African Prince, As Related by Himself was published in Bath
in 1772; in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1774; in Dublin in 1790; and in
Salem, New York, in 1809. A year after Gronniosaw's notable begin-
ning, Phillis Wheatley, stolen from West Africa and enslaved in Bos-

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