ABSTRACT
Declarations of freedom and human rights have been at the heart of American politics from its nascent settler era to the present, but this political framework was built on the explicit and aggressive denial of Black humanity and rights to citizenry. In the nation’s literature as well as its political articulations, whiteness would come to symbolize legitimate membership into the body politic. While the nation’s founding white fathers fancied themselves models of an emerging enlightened humanity, African and African-descended people scrutinized the contradictions of their espoused ideals of democracy and their zealous practice of slaving. In their oral and written traditions, Blacks articulated skepticisms of these grand declarations of human rights and liberties that were withheld from them. In its ironic cultivation of itself as democratic beacon of the world, America would ultimately ignore the legacy of slaving as part of its historical polity and history as literature would become the nation’s medium for propagation of this national self-portrait. In an ongoing dance where history and literature would be intertwined to construct a narrative of Americanness, the nation’s intricate hand in the centuries arc of slaving continues to compromise the myth.
