| Abstract | “The political and cultural identities of black people have never been reducible to a discrete and unified list of interests and ideas.”In 2008 and 2012, excited by the promise of the first black United States president, African Americans voted en masse for Barack Obama.A superficial reading of these voting patterns suggests that despite their many differences, most African Americans agree on certain political issues.Examining the emergence of published African-English authors and their views on Africa during the late eighteenth-century highlights the complexity of black thought and identity in US history.The Société d’hommes de Couleur published the journal from 1834 to 1842, and the journal was one of the first European journals published by people of African descent.This long event, or series of events, of death, discontinuity and trauma has shaped scholarly debate about both individual and collective memory in relationship to Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano–two of the most significant authors of late eighteenth-century African Diasporic Anglo-Atlantic print culture.In the case of Phillis Wheatley, black scholars and activists have debated whether her poetry constituted a false consciousness arising from Protestant conversion or a subtle and brilliant critique of proslavery Christianity.Here Wheatley invoked the imagined grief of parents who must endure the kidnapping of their daughter.Equiano closed the theological gap between African and Judeo…
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