Ignatius Sancho Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

A topographical reading of Ignatius Sancho’s letters, especially as it relates to his detailed account of the Gordon riots of 1780, remains a gap in Sancho’s studies. Most of the earlier studies have only mentioned his account of the riots briefly. His account of the riots spans across four letters addressed to banker John Spink, which have all been, along with several other letters he wrote, posthumously published in the collection, Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African. As part of my discussion, I will show how a mapping of the spaces described in Sancho’s Letters reveals the unlikelihood of his account being solely eyewitness. Here, however, I aim to follow Sancho’s movement through the disrupted spaces where the riots took place and examine his reactions to these spaces. My conclusion here is that Sancho associates with the largely unscathed spaces of Westminster, where he lived, an indication of the social wellness of the area, and himself.

One of the most surprising connections of the American Revolutionary era emerged at the very beginning of the war between the African American poet Phillis Wheatley and the commander in chief of the American forces, George Washington. Wheatley's impact on Washington, though subtle, may well have contributed to one of the most important changes in his life.

- by James Basker
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- Slavery, History of Slavery, Abolition of Slavery, Anti-slavery
- by Joseph Rezek
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- Transatlantic relations, History of Slavery, Book History (History), Black Atlantic

OPEN ACCESS: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58641-6
This open access book discusses British literature as part of a network of global entangled modernities and shared aesthetic concerns, departing from the retrospective model of a postcolonial “writing back” to the centre. Accordingly, the narrative strategies in the texts of early Black Atlantic authors, like Equiano, Sancho, Wedderburn, and Seacole, and British canonical novelists, such as Defoe, Sterne, Austen, and Dickens, are framed as entangled tonalities. Via their engagement with discourses on slavery, abolition, and imperialism, these texts shaped an understanding of national belonging as a form of familial feeling. This study thus complicates the “rise of the novel” framework and British middle-class identity formation from a transnational perspective combining approaches in narrative studies with postcolonial and queer theory.

- by Elahe Haschemi Yekani
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- English Literature, Postcolonial Studies, History of Slavery, Jane Austen

In this article I discuss an important event in the emergence of discourses of racial identity and racial character within the early abolitionist movement: the posthumous publication of the Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, An African (1782). According to his editors, this publication was designed to decry the injustices of slavery by demonstrating Sancho’s intellectual accomplishments. In practice, however, it actually compromised Sancho’s bid for self-determined characterization in his correspondence. The wide range of personae that Sancho marshaled in his letters allowed him to create positions of agency and authority by inducing his correspondents to reconsider or act against their culture’s preconceptions. His multivalent self-characterization, however, was in the publication of his letters reduced to the singular identity of “An African”: a black man and a former slave whose example argued for abolition. Sancho was thus turned into the object of abolitionist argument; he became a specimen to illustrate and validate the larger abolitionist discourse, and in the process lost the character of an independent person.