Race and Respectability in an Early Black Atlantic

“This is the book that students and teachers have been waiting for, a book that will enable lay readers and experts alike to draw a clearer and more nuanced throughline from the arrival of enslaved Africans in 1619 to the state-sanctioned killings of Black Americans in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.” ~Zachary McLeod Hutchins, author of Before Equiano: A Prehistory of the North American Slave Narrative

“Cassander L. Smith gifts us an erudite, powerful, and refreshing analysis of racialized Blackness and the sociocultural matrix of respectability politics negotiated by Black people across the early African diaspora. Interdisciplinary in scope and meticulously researched, with trailblazing links to our present political climate, Smith’s arresting and incomparable work takes us on a tantalizing journey into the world of early African American and early African diasporic cultural and literary production. This book is a game changer!” ~Nicholas R. Jones, author of Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain

“Cassander L. Smith makes a powerful argument that Black writers, starting approximately in 1600, used letters sent throughout the Atlantic world as platforms to construct the first ‘respectability politics,’ a strategy usually associated with writers working in the nineteenth century. Race and Respectability in an Early Black Atlantic suggests that epistolary accomplishments belong in the early African American canon on equal footing with more widely studied literary forms such as folktales and autobiographies.” ~John Saillant, author of Black Puritan, Black Republican: The Life and Thought of Lemuel Haynes, 1753–1833