De la littérature des Nègres, ou, Recherches sur leurs facultés intellectuelles, leurs qualités morales et leur littérature : suivies de notices sur la vie et les ouvrages des Nègres qui se sont distingués dans les sciences, les lettres et les arts
Contributions
- Henri Grégoire
- author
- Claude-François Maradan
- publisher
Related resources
- has translation
- An Enquiry Concerning the Intellectual and Moral Faculties, and Literature of Negroes: followed with an account of the life and works of fifteen negroes & mulattoes, distinguished in science, literature and the arts translation has paratext
Notes
Grégoire's book systematically refutes all the major arguments for the inferiority of blacks, countering them with examples showing how black people and black societies possess the same elements of intellect and civilization found in white societies. Its examples of African-American achievement, especially the biographical listings in Chapter VII, remained a standard source for abolitionist writings throughout the nineteenth century. The works and achievements of most of the writers cited – Equiano, Ignatius Sancho, and Phyllis Wheatley, for example – would have been known in transatlantic intellectual circles of the time, though their accomplishments had not been previously documented in this manner. In one sense, Grégoire’s book is the pioneering volume of African-American literary criticism.
In his arguments supporting black intellect, leadership and initiative, Grégoire’s examples of the Haitian Revolutionary leaders Toussaint L’Ouverture and Ogé won him no favors in Bonapartist France, which had quickly moved to repress the Revolution in Haiti and reinforce the rights of slaveholders.