What are the perceived differences among African Americans, West
Indians, and Afro Latin Americans? What are the hierarchies implicit in
those perceptions, and when and how did these develop? For Ifeoma Kiddoe
Nwankwo the turning point came in the wake of the Haitian Revolution of
1804. The uprising was significant because it not only brought into
being the first Black republic in the Americas but also encouraged new
visions of the interrelatedness of peoples of the African Diaspora.
Black Cosmopolitanism looks to the aftermath of this historical moment
to examine the disparities and similarities between the approaches to
identity articulated by people of African descent in the United States,
Cuba, and the British West Indies during the nineteenth century.
In Black Cosmopolitanism, Nwankwo contends that whites' fears of the
Haitian Revolution and its potentially contagious nature virtually
forced people of African descent throughout the Americas who were in the
public eye to articulate their stance toward the event. While some U.S.
writers, like William Wells Brown, chose not to mention the existence of
people of African heritage in other countries, others, like David
Walker, embraced the Haitian Revolution and the message that it sent.
Particularly in print, people of African descent had to decide where to
position themselves and whether to emphasize their national or
cosmopolitan, transnational identities.
Through readings of slave narratives, fiction, poetry, nonfiction,
newspaper editorials, and government documents that include texts by
Frederick Douglass, the freed West Indian slave Mary Prince, and the
Cuban poets Plácido and Juan Francisco Manzano, Nwankwo explicates this
growing self-consciousness about publicly engaging other peoples of
African descent. Ultimately, she contends, these writers configured
their identities specifically to counter not only the Atlantic power
structure's negation of their potential for transnational identity but
also its simultaneous denial of their humanity and worthiness for
national citizenship.