Race, the Public Sphere, and Abolition in Late Eighteenth-Century New York

Mungo, who lately arrived into this city from the United States of America, where he has been kept in slavery for upwards of twenty years, has given us a long and melancholy account of the treatment of the poor African in that land of cruelty, read the opening line of an excerpt from the imaginary Gazette of Guinea. This curious parody, printed in a 1795 edition of Mott and Hurtin 's NewYork Weekly Chronicle, provided a multilayered satire of public discourse regarding racial bondage. Conferring the name Cato Mungo on the African returnee made him the bearer of two names-one evoking Rome, the other evoking Africa-used to signal black characters in newspaper poems and anecdotes. The heading AFRICAN INTEIU JGENCE placed above the Gazette of Guinea byline was a racially motivated pun. Real Africans apparently did not evince the intelligence to produce newspapers, a reflection on their presumed backwardness

Political science · Politics · Public sphere · Race (biology · Sociology · Gender Studies · Law · Race, History, and American Society

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  Open Access•Alain El Youssef•2011

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