Performance Cultures and Black Atlantic Literature, 1750-1833

This dissertation approaches performance cultures as integral components of early black Atlantic writing, and considers how meaning is produced at the intersection of writing and vernacular performance. It asserts that black writers, in their portrayal of performance practices, encode avenues and strategies for accessing other black voices in their communities. Pairing writing by black authors and a selection of comparable vernacular practices, my dissertation examines how these forms signify upon each other, offering new contexts for interpreting the black experience in the long eighteenth century. In exploring this thesis, my work approaches Olaudah Equiano’s narrative as illustrative of the ways in which black autobiographical narrators deploy acts of racial mimicry and other embodied practices to trouble their narratives’ textual meaning. Likewise, early poets like Phillis Wheatley and Jupiter Hammon draw upon the traditions of African American hymnody, revealing the ways in which the communal beliefs celebrated by black hymn singers sanction their own writerly craft. Early sermons, such as those written by John Marrant and Absalom Jones, reenact the traditions of black itinerant performance, while black letters and petitions recreate the settings and politics of the emerging black public sphere. As I argue, these texts, all multimodal in character, point to a broader black literary tradition, a collection of rhetorical artifacts, that maps the contours of black life and politics often through irony, revision, and protest