Nineteenth-Century African American Narratives and Speeches in Britain and Ireland

This two-volume scholarly anthology publishes nineteen narratives and eighty speeches written by African American authors in Britain and Ireland in the nineteenth century in a contemporary edition for the first time. This two-volume set reproduces nineteen narratives and eighty speeches by world famous and under-researched African American freedom fighters, liberators and human rights campaigners living and working in Scotland, Ireland, Wales and England in the nineteenth century. Both books include in-depth introductory essays, author biographies, scholarly annotations and detailed biographies. All the narratives and speeches included in these books constitute radical declarations of Black artistic and political independence. Each author bears witness to their determination to resist white racist attempts to script, edit and censor Black acts and arts of imaginative literary production. Across both books, all of the authors and orators testify to their lifelong ‘fight for freedom’ across their radical and revolutionary works. Throughout their lives, they warred against the ‘sufferings and horrors’ of enslavement as a centuries-old ‘cursed institution.’ ‘Words are weapons’ in their fight for Black liberation. Across their life’s works, they all protested against the rise of the ‘spirit of slavery’ in white supremacist and white racist U.S. and British transatlantic societies.