Some outstanding recent examples include Grace Nichols: I Is a Long Memoried Woman (1983), Caryll Phillips: Cambridge (1991) and David Dabydeen: Turner (1994). In the 20th century, this tradition was sustained by largely autobiographical prose, often focusing on the imaginative reworking of the slave experience. Thereafter, during the 19th century, black literature would continue to flourish, in Britain, with Mary Seacole ( no 62 in this series) and, in the USA, with Frederick Douglass ( no 68).
Sancho would pioneer a flourishing genre that runs from Ottobah Cugoano in 1787 ( Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species) to Mary Prince in 1831 ( The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave). In the book trade, Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho (1782) were probably the first to mobilise English readers against racial discrimination and the horrors of the slave trade. Equiano’s Interesting Narrative is the most famous of these, especially once it was taken up by supporters of the abolition movement, but he was not the first African slave to publish a book in England, or, if we remember Dr Johnson’s manservant, Francis Barber, the first to have some experience of London literary life. B lack literature begins with the slave memoirs of the 18th century.
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