ABSTRACT
The number of published narratives by Africans caught in transatlantic slavery is much larger than most scholars realize, and together these ‘slave narratives’ provide tremendous insight into Atlantic slavery. These incredible life stories depict a never-ending search by Africans to survive the Middle Passage, improve their circumstances, and just live. Based on analysis of more than 200 narratives published in contemporary scientific journals, abolitionist works, and modern scholarly studies from a project entitled “A Catalog of Published Narratives by Africans Enslaved in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1586–1936,” this chapter investigates how Africans appropriated Enlightenment, revolutionary, and Christian ideals of liberty and equality, along with Islamic ideas of reform (jihâd), to attack transatlantic slavery. Middle Passage survivors like Phillis Wheatley and Boyrereau Brinch (Jeffrey Brace) in North America, Jean-Baptist Belley in Haiti, a Muslim named José Maria Rufino in Brazil, and others recognized the hypocrisy in the revolutionary ideology developing in lands where slavery continued and applied the full meaning of that ideology to resist slavery. These findings heighten our understanding of how the Black Atlantic functioned during the Age of Revolution and Emancipation by showing how African perspectives interacted with ideologies of the era and shaped transatlantic events.
