Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794-1861 (review)

Abstract

Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and Challenge of History, 1794-1861. By John Ernest. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Pp. xiv, 426. Cloth, $59.95; paper, $21.95.)Writing within debilitating confines of the state (4) and what Charles Mills terms racial contract (4), antebellum African American historians, according to John Ernest, self-consciously intervened in of historical writing, demonstrating dogged determination to deconstruct misconceptions and misrepresentations of mainstream American historiography. Ernest urges reenvisioning theatre of to acknowledge historical authority and authenticity of a wide range of (36) by African American writers and activists aimed at promoting liberating application of past. These antebellum black authors and leaders-David Walker, James W. C. Pennington, James Theodore Holly, Absalom Jones, Richard Alien, Hosea Easton, Frederick Douglass, Henry Garnet, Martin Delany, William Wells Brown, William C. Nell, and Robert Lewis-produced critical historical works and performances that hitherto were either ignored or caricatured as lacking in historical substance. Through this conscious intervention, Ernest argues, these African Americans inaugurated tradition of liberation directed at liberating blacks from an other-defined and providing them with in self-determined understanding of (18).Ernest argues strongly and passionately for acknowledging historical worth of antebellum African American protest literatures and traditions. These writings, he contends, were directed at deconstructing mainstream white supremacist historiography and reversing its debilitating and destructive impacts. In response to mainstream historiography that either denied historicity of black experience or portrayed experience and history as negative and marginal, African American historians and protest leaders constructed and offered counter-hegemonic conception of history and community, producing self-empowered community united by liberating conception of identity.With such publications as David Walker's Appeal (1830), William Wells Brown's The Black Man (1863), Narrative (1847), and The Rising Son (1874), William C. Nell's Colored Patriots (1855), Robert Lewis's Light and Truth (1844), and many others, black writers sought to recover and redeem lost and maligned past. Theirs was an exercise in intellectual defiance, driven largely by determination to authenticate and validate African and African American historical experiences and heritage. They challenged Baricroftization (98) of American history, and sought integration of black experience into national narrative of history. In pursuit and actualization of this objective, Ernest argues, black writers and activists produced and performed works/acts of critical historical worth and relevance. These works and performances combined both secular and spiritual values, reflecting authors' sociohistorical and religious experiences and worldviews. Such history also offered basis both for collective moral identity and agency and for moral indictment of white society.Fundamentally, underlying dynamics of antebellum African Americans' quest for historical understanding arid community construction, Ernest suggests, was need to both provide moral authority and inspire moral responsibility that would propel black community toward social activism. he underlines following key features of this historiography: it sought to rehabilitate and redeem African American experience from historical oblivion; wherever possible, it illuminated contributions of blacks to American history and national development; it corrected and revised errors and fallacies of mainstream historiography. This revision entailed reinterpreting existing documents to include African American experience and establish its authenticity and worth. …