Poems and stories deal with the emotional and material interdependence of women, mother figures, and contemporary social and political issues

Product Description: Containing extracts from all the major Afro-British writers and many early Black American, West African and Caribbean writers who spent time in Britain, this anthology is a sparkling introduction to the rich tradition of Black British writing...read more

In Unchained Voices, Vincent Carretta has assembled the most comprehensive anthology ever published of writings by eighteenth-century people of African descent, enabling many of these authors to be heard clearly for the first time in two centuries. Their writings reflect the surprisingly diverse experiences of blacks on both sides of the Atlantic-America, Britain, the West Indies, and Africa - between 1760 and 1798. Letters, poems, captivity narratives, petitions, criminal autobiographies, economic treatises, travel accounts, and antislavery arguments were produced during a time of various and changing political and religious loyalties. Although the theme of liberation from physical or spiritual captivity runs throughout the collection, freedom also clearly led to hardship and disappointment for a number of these authors. In his introduction, Carretta reconstructs the historical and cultural context of the works, emphasizing the constraints of the eighteenth-century genres under which these authors wrote. The texts and annotations are based on extensive research in both published and manuscript holdings of archives in the United States and the United Kingdom. Appropriate for undergraduates as well as for scholars, Unchained Voices gives a clear sense of the major literary and cultural issues at the heart of writings in English by people of African descent.

Product Description: The first anthology of its kind, this timely collection brings together a diverse range of black British literatures, essays and documents from across the post-war period within a single volume. Spanning half a century, this rich archive of representations includes South Asian, African and Caribbean cultural production by both leading and lesser-known artists, critics and commentators:...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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