In 1986, the literary critic William L. Andrews argued for the multiple registers on which antebellum slave narratives signify. The “free” story they tell recounts both the physical journey from slavery to freedom and also the more subtle struggle to write independently, especially in light of the prevailing racial attitudes in antebellum America that might distort black authorship. Insofar as this model imagines the scene of literary production as the arena of racial collaboration and conflict, it is useful for thinking about early black print literature – but only up to a point. This literature cannot simply be lumped together with the more canonical works of the antebellum period as a way of tightly suturing the continuities within the African American literary “tradition.” It emerged at a distinctive historical moment, and its formal and thematic complexity arises largely from that moment. This is a literature about movement – geographical, ontological, and rhetorical. As a way of accounting for this fluidity of personae and identities, Paul Gilroy has argued that we should reexamine our assumptions about the place of “race” and “nation” in this literature and read it instead in light of the “transcultural international formation” that he calls the “Black Atlantic.” This includes the areas through which black subjects traveled as both free personae and bonded servants: the West African littoral, Britain, British America, eastern Canada, and the Caribbean.