figures to revise in their own texts. This form of revision grounds each
individual work in a larger context, and creates formal lines of conti-
nuity between the texts that together constitute the shared text of
blackness.

What seems clear upon reading the earliest texts by black writers in
English--and the critical texts that respond to these black writings--
is that the production of literature was taken to be the central arena in
which persons of African descent could establish and redefine their
status within the human community. Black people, the evidence sug-
gests, had to represent themselves as "speaking subjects" before they
could begin to destroy their status as objects, as commodities, within
Western culture. For centuries, Europeans had questioned whether
the African "species of men" could ever master the arts and sciences;
that is, whether they could create literature. If they could, the argu-
ment ran, then the African variety of humanity and the European
variety were fundamentally related. If not, then it seemed that the Af-
rican was predestined by nature to be a slave.

To answer that question, several whites in Europe and America un-
dertook experiments in which young African slaves were tutored
alongside white children. Phillis Wheatley was the result of one such
experiment; other notables include Francis Williams, a Jamaican who
took the B.A. at Cambridge before 1750; Jacobus Capitein, who
earned several degrees in Holland; Anton Wilhelm Amo, who took the
doctorate in philosophy at Halle, Germany; and Ignatius Sancho, who
published a volume of letters in 1782. Their published writings, in
Latin, Dutch, German, and English, were scrutinized and employed
by both sides in the slavery debates.

So widespread was the debate over "the nature of the African" in
the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that writing by blacks
found a large audience, and was often subject to review by the most
eminent authorities. (Not until the Harlem Renaissance would black
literature again be taken so seriously.) Phillis Wheatley's reviewers
included Voltaire, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Samuel
Rush, and James Beatty, to name only a few. Francis Williams's work
was analyzed by David Hume and Immanuel Kant. ( Hegel, writing in
the Philosophy of History in 1813, took the absence of writing among
Africans as the sign of their innate inferiority.) The list of commenta-
tors is extensive, amounting to a veritable "Who's Who" of the
French, Scottish, and American Enlightenments.

Why was the writing of the African of such importance to the eigh-

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