Between 1750 and 1800, writers of African descent drew on oral and written traditions to create literature that expressed their desires for freedom, equality, and a future for themselves and their children. Moved and shaped by transitional events ranging from the forced migration of millions of Africans to enslavement in the Americas to revolutions that shook and transformed the British colonies, Saint-Domingue, and France, they developed cultural productions that articulated their longings, supported their communities, and impacted the rapidly shifting sociopolitical environments in which they lived. Like Phillis Wheatley, who publicly declared her impatience of oppression in a letter to Rev. Samson Occum on the eve of the American Revolution, they were compelled to resist enslavement, choose their own racial affiliations, and assert their agency by writing themselves into the metanarratives that marginalized or omitted them.

In her chapter, Thomas reads pre-1800 legal writings about people of African descent as Black life writing. She expands autobiographical writing beyond an account of an individual’s growth and development in cases of people of African descent to narratives regarding Black people as active agents forming an embodied community racialized and marginalized by the dominant culture. Thomas argues that Black writers published autobiographical writings and also wove personal narratives into legal documents from fidavits to freedom petitions, as well as into traditional literary forms such as poems and letters. However, during the same colonial and early American eras, people of European descent inscribed details about Black peoples in a variety of historical records such as the census, bills of sale, antislavery pamphlets, court records, and runaway slave advertisements to accentuate their differences from and inability to assimilate into the majority culture.