Barbaric Culture and Black Critique
In an interdisciplinary study of black intellectual history at the dawn of the nineteenth century, Stefan M. Wheelock shows how black antislavery writers were able to counteract ideologies of white supremacy while fostering a sense of racial community and identity. The major figures he discusses—Ottobah Cugoano, Olaudah Equiano, David Walker, and Maria Stewart—engaged the concepts of democracy, freedom, and equality as these ideas ripened within the context of racial terror and colonial hegemony. Wheelock highlights the ways in which religious and secular versions of collective political destiny both competed and cooperated to forge a vision for a more perfect and just society. By appealing to religious sensibilities and calling for emancipation, these writers addressed slavery and its cultural bearing on the Atlantic in varied, complex, and sometimes contradictory ways during a key period in the development of Western political identity and modernity.
- John Richard Ernest, University of Delaware, author of A Nation within a Nation: Organizing African-American Communities before the Civil WarIn Stefan M. Wheelock’s strikingly insightful study, the profound roots of modern black intellectual history rise through the fractured instabilities of white discourses of civilization, philosophy, and progress. This is an important study of how black writing works and why we need to place it at the center of historical research.
- Christian CenturyIn terms of professional scholarship, Wheelock’s work is a breath of fresh air because it refuses to abide by any racial color line. This is not a book of only black writers. It is one where the works of Cugoano, Equiano, Walker, and Stewart are set in dynamic tension and conversation with white writers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, Granville Sharp, Jonathan Edwards, and Thomas Jefferson.
- American LiteratureBarbaric Culture and Black Critique is an important intervention in the fields of Atlantic studies and antislavery history, which Wheelock argues have largely neglected the contributions of early black writers; the book does reveal the unique contributions to and disruption of white antislavery discourse in an engaging anddirect style. Beyond this, Wheelock’s work offers another perspective on the history of African American religious rhetoric as it was deployed in discretely political spaces.
- Anglican and Episcopal History[I]n Barbaric Culture and, Black Critique, Stefan Wheelock uses theory and literary analysis to focus on a number of key works in black antislavery literature. Wheelock begins chronologically where Carron ends, with the entrance of black Christians into the public sphere via antislavery publications. His analysis insightfully unpacks why it martered that Catron's subjects embraced black Protestantism: religion offered a methodological base and heft that could forcefully take on slavery at its root.
Stefan M. Wheelock is Assistant Professor of English at George Mason University.
