1. The Politics of Early African American Literature

Abstract

This chapter looks at the debate between Thomas Jefferson and David Walker—an African American author—over whether New World African intellectual culture should be an entrance examination to the early American polity. It provides a reading of Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia and its 1829 critique, David Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America. In Notes, Jefferson's dismissal of the ability of blacks to reason and imagine, and then to produce exceptional literature, was so reprehensible that subsequent generations of black writers sought to refute it. Indeed, Walker attempts to debunk Jefferson's prescription of reason and imagination for political citizenship by taking advantage of his membership in an educated black elite whose broad grasp of Western history and whose access to the resources of print culture enhanced its authority in the public sphere.