ABSTRACT
John Jea is a deeply obscure figure in early black Atlantic literature. This is hardly surprising: most of the sparse information about him is contained in his little-known and rarely reprinted autobiography, The Life, History, and Unparalleled Sufferings of John Jea, The African Preacher (Portsea, c.1815). Few copies of this book, unusual amongst African-English texts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in having been initially published outside London, are still in existence. Jea’s choice of self-designation is significant and is repeated in his next, even more obscure, work, A Collection of Hymns Compiled and Selected by John Jea. African Preacher Of The Gospel (Portsea, 1816). Even though he spent most of his life in America, chiefly New York and Boston, Jea chose to identify himself with Africa, the continent from which he had been taken at the age of three. Part of his motivation may have been to alert readers to his unusualness, his colour being his unique selling point when it came to promoting his publications.
