write a note on black literary expression in 19th century America?

In the chapter entitled “The Trope of the Talking Book,”
of Henry Louis Gates’ The Signifying Monkey, he writes that “it is
to the literature of the black slave that the critic must turn to identify the beginning
of the Afro-American literary tradition” (127). Because black literary culture did not
exist at the time of slave literature, it was not the purpose of these narratives to
demonstrate a literary tradition, but rather to demonstrate the slave’s “own membership
in the human community” (128). Gates describes the eighteenth century view that reason,
above all else, was the mark of humanity and writing was the yardstick by which reason
could be measured. Blacks, then, could continue to be viewed as subhuman in their
inability to master the Western markers of humanity (129). Ironically, it was the Age of
Enlightenment which “led directly to the relegation of black people to a lower rung on
the Great Chain of Being” (130). Black people, then, could only “become” human, could
only assert their humanness in the white world, by participating in the white literary
tradition. In a world where black people were commodities, objects rather than subjects,
the act of telling one’s story, of having it written down and published, read by others,
was essentially the act of creating a voice and of having a voice,
of becoming a subject.

The trope of the Talking Book,
according to Gates, was a literary device used by several authors of slave narratives.
He writes that its importance lies in “making the white written text speak with a black
voice” and that through its use, the black slave “literally [wrote] themselves into
being through carefully crafted representation in language of the black self” (131).
This trope is especially important because it was the “first repeated and revised upon
trope of the tradition” (132). Gates outlines the four known uses of the trope, how they
were each written, both in their own right and in response to their previous
uses.

John Marrant’s narrative, The Narrative of
the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, A Black, is the next text
examined by Gates. It is here that Gronniosaw’s trope of the Talking Book is
reconfigured meaningfully for the first time, now turned on its head, so that Marrant
himself is the one with the power to speak to the Book. Here, too, Gates points out the
binaries. John Marrant is Christian, again the favored position, which stands opposite
the Native American polytheism of his captors. Here, Marrant’s captors are unable to
speak to the book which Marrant can. Gates writes that “in this Kingdom of the Cherokee,
it is only the black man who can make the text speak” (144); here the black/white
opposition is relinquished in favor of associating “black” with God, but without a true
polarity. Marrant’s revision of the trope, Gates suggests, “seeks to reverse the
received trope by displacement and substitution” (145). Furthermore, Marrant’s narrative
does not place him in the position of having to, or trying to, relinquish his
“blackness,” which instead is seen within the context of other non-Whites. The literary
is the favored position against the non-literary and is the position which Marrant with
his power.

Literature
Cited

Gates Jr., Henry Louis. The Signifying
Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1988.