Tropicalizing Philip Quaque: On African Atlantic Literatures

Abstract

Whereas slave narratives are classics of eighteenth-century studies, there has been scant attention to African eighteenth-century writing written by parties implicated in the slave trade. That absence reduces the diversity of African statements about the slave trade and African participation in the pre-abolition Atlantic world. Using the letters of Philip Quaque, as a case study, I argue that attention to the sparse eighteenth-century West African literary culture complicates the repertoire of African representations of the slave-trading Atlantic world.