John Saillant
Biographic Data
| ID | 370075 |
|---|---|
| NAME | John Saillant |
| GIVEN NAMES | John |
| FAMILY NAME | Saillant |
| SIGNATURE | SAILLANT J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Western Michigan University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3724-9101 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 21 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1990 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Walking as Englishmen and running as Africans in 1830s Trinidad
Black Letters Close the Eighteenth Century
This chapter argues that eighteenth-century African Atlantic authors perceived in the lives of Black people, distorted and destroyed by the slave system, a chaos that could be understood, protested, and then converted into a transition to a better Black world. The key to this understanding was Reformed Christian religion, and the guides to this transition were supposed to be religiously informed writers. Texts of early African Atlantic authors tr…
A sailor’s kin: Faith, sexuality, and antislavery, 1840–1856
An 1856 Black-authored autobiography, The Life of John Thompson, made significant advances in the genre of the American slave narrative. A runaway slave, whaler, folk theologian, and, ultimately, abolitionist author, Thompson expressed sympathy for a queer man trapped in slavery and sold away from the family and friends, almost certainly for purposes of sexual abuse by white men. Moreover, Thompson narrated a religious journey beginning with trad…
The Invisible Man of Indecency: Profanity and the Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African (1782)
This essay analyses vulgarities in Ignatius Sancho's letters, which were collected and published posthumously (in 1782) by one of his correspondents to provide revenue for Sancho's widow and children. It proposes a role for Sancho in English letters never previously suggested: that he used sexual innuendo in the manner of Swift, Sterne and London playwrights to spur a number of patrons and benefactors to provide gifts of money, food and other nec…
Notes and Documents: An 1815 Latin Dissertation on Hysteria by ‘Coloured’ Trinidadian John-Baptiste Philip
Blood from the Sky: Miracles and Politics in the Early American Republic
The Memoirs of Toussaint and Isaac Louverture: Representing the Black Masculine Subject in Narratives of Mourning and Loss by Arthur F. Saint-Aubin
Reviewed by: The Memoirs of Toussaint and Isaac Louverture: Representing the Black Masculine Subject in Narratives of Mourning and Loss by Arthur F. Saint-Aubin John Saillant The Memoirs of Toussaint and Isaac Louverture: Representing the Black Masculine Subject in Narratives of Mourning and Loss. By Arthur F. Saint-Aubin. Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2015. ISBN 978-1-61146-195-4. 237 pp. $88 hardcover. Arthur F. Saint-Aubin has writte…
Sexuality at the Northern Border of Early African American Print Culture
This essay attributes an 1815 condemnation of fornication, published in Vermont, to Lemuel Haynes (1753-1833). Redressing a deficit of scholarly attention to sexuality in early African American print culture, it contextualizes Haynes's document within a spectrum of similar texts, and notes the variety of print culture instruments available to early African American authors, including anonymous publication, financial subscription, and publishing u…
Make a Black Life, and Bid It Sing: Sacred Song in The Life, History, and Unparalleled Sufferings of John Jea
Scholarship on the American-born Afro-British author John Jea (c. 1773–after 1817) has focused on his c. 1816 autobiography. Scholars have examined Jea's life a sailor, his literacy, his opposition to slavery, and his indifference to dependent or marginalized people, whether free or enslaved. This essay argues that Jea's 1816 Collection of Hymns should be read as a companion to his memoir. When the two books are read together, scholars gain a cle…
Afro-Virginian History and Culture
Edward Countryman. Enjoy the Same Liberty: Black Americans and the Revolutionary Era
This book appears in an African American history series aimed at non-specialists and dedicated to bridging popular and academic history. The meat of the book (pp. 31–124) examines black history from 1770 to 1831, emphasizing the black men and black women who resisted and criticized slavery. Documents (pp. 125–169), with the most recent, by President Barack Obama, dating from 2008, constitute examples. The thrust of Edward Countryman's argument is…
Freedom's Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers
This book is a contextual biography of Richard Allen (1760–1831), minister (ordained in 1799 by Francis Asbury), first bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (founded in 1816), and defender of black rights in religion and society. Several substantial documents survive to help us understand Allen's life: a narrative, co-authored with Absalom Jones, of the yellow fever that plagued Philadelphia in 1793; an autobiography dictated shortly b…
Birth of the Nation: The First Federal Congress, 1789-1791 First Federal Congress Project
An African's Life: The Life and Times of Olaudah Equiano, 1745-1799
Antiguan Methodism and Antislavery Activity: Anne and Elizabeth Hart in the Eighteenth-Century Black Atlantic
Around 1790, two young sisters born into a slaveholding free black family began instructing Antiguan slaves in literacy and Christianity. The sisters, Anne (1768-1834) and Elizabeth (1771-1833) Hart, first instructed their father's slaves at Popeshead-he may have hired them out rather than using them on his own crops-then labored among enslaved women and children in Antiguan plantations and in towns and ports like St. John's and English Harbour. …
Traveling in Old and New Worlds with John Jea, the African Preacher, 1773–1816
Nineteenth-century exslave narratives allow us to understand the way in which freedmen, freedwomen, and runaways experienced and enjoyed liberty. In such narratives, liberty, naturally enough, it seems, is the opposite of slavery. Once free, one was no longer a slave. Yet we should view this understanding of slavery and freedom as a problem in itself, as a rhetorical and time-bound use of the notions of enslavement and liberty. This article argue…
The American Enlightenment in Africa: Jefferson's Colonizationism and Black Virginians' Migration to Liberia, 1776-1840
The American Enlightenment in Africa: Jefferson’s Colonizationism and Black Virginians’ Migration to Liberia, 1776–1840 John Saillant (bio) To emancipate all slaves born after the passing of the act. . . . They should continue with their parents to a certain age, then to be brought up, at the public expense, to tillage, arts, or sciences, according to their geniuses, till the females should be eighteen, and the males twenty-one years of age, when…
Slavery and Divine Providence in New England Calvinism: The New Divinity and a Black Protest, 1775-1805
THE New Divinity ministers, who forged their careers in the era of the American Revolution and the early republic, faced a dilemma. If sin were divinely ordained and directed toward some higher purpose, as Jonathan Edwards had so forcefully argued, then how were two of the more prominent sins of the day-slavery and the slave trade-to be explained? Between 1775 and 1800, the most notable of Edwards's New Divinity heirs struggled with the issue. Ma…
Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles, and Beyond, 1700-1990
Americanism: Revolutionary Order and Societal Self-Interpretation in the American Republic
Lemuel Haynes's Black Republicanism and the American Republican Tradition, 1775-1820
Lemuel Haynes and the Revolutionary Origins of Black Theology, 1776-1801
Lemuel Haynes was a black Congregationalist minister to mostly white churches in New England and New York between 1788 and his death in 1833. Abandoned as an infant, Haynes was reared as an indentured servant in a pious white Massachusetts family. He served in the American Revolution in 1774 and 1775 as a Minute Man and in 1776 as a soldier in the march to Fort Ticonderoga. In 1776, Haynes composed an essay, "Liberty Further Extended: Or Free Tho…
The Spirit of Modern Republicanism: The Moral Vision of the American Founders and the Philosophy of Locke
The Spirit of Modern Republicanism: The Moral Vision of the American Founders and the Philosophy of Locke
Antiguan Methodism and Antislavery Activity: Anne and Elizabeth Hart in the Eighteenth-Century Black Atlantic
Around 1790, two young sisters born into a slaveholding free black family began instructing Antiguan slaves in literacy and Christianity. The sisters, Anne (1768-1834) and Elizabeth (1771-1833) Hart, first instructed their father's slaves at Popeshead-he may have hired them out rather than using them on his own crops-then labored among enslaved women and children in Antiguan plantations and in towns and ports like St. John's and English Harbour. …
The American Enlightenment in Africa: Jefferson's Colonizationism and Black Virginians' Migration to Liberia, 1776-1840
The American Enlightenment in Africa: Jefferson’s Colonizationism and Black Virginians’ Migration to Liberia, 1776–1840 John Saillant (bio) To emancipate all slaves born after the passing of the act. . . . They should continue with their parents to a certain age, then to be brought up, at the public expense, to tillage, arts, or sciences, according to their geniuses, till the females should be eighteen, and the males twenty-one years of age, when…
Lemuel Haynes's Black Republicanism and the American Republican Tradition, 1775-1820
Traveling in Old and New Worlds with John Jea, the African Preacher, 1773–1816
Nineteenth-century exslave narratives allow us to understand the way in which freedmen, freedwomen, and runaways experienced and enjoyed liberty. In such narratives, liberty, naturally enough, it seems, is the opposite of slavery. Once free, one was no longer a slave. Yet we should view this understanding of slavery and freedom as a problem in itself, as a rhetorical and time-bound use of the notions of enslavement and liberty. This article argue…
The Spirit of Modern Republicanism: The Moral Vision of the American Founders and the Philosophy of Locke
Lemuel Haynes and the Revolutionary Origins of Black Theology, 1776-1801
Lemuel Haynes was a black Congregationalist minister to mostly white churches in New England and New York between 1788 and his death in 1833. Abandoned as an infant, Haynes was reared as an indentured servant in a pious white Massachusetts family. He served in the American Revolution in 1774 and 1775 as a Minute Man and in 1776 as a soldier in the march to Fort Ticonderoga. In 1776, Haynes composed an essay, "Liberty Further Extended: Or Free Tho…
Americanism: Revolutionary Order and Societal Self-Interpretation in the American Republic
Lemuel Haynes's Black Republicanism and the American Republican Tradition, 1775-1820
Slavery and Divine Providence in New England Calvinism: The New Divinity and a Black Protest, 1775-1805
THE New Divinity ministers, who forged their careers in the era of the American Revolution and the early republic, faced a dilemma. If sin were divinely ordained and directed toward some higher purpose, as Jonathan Edwards had so forcefully argued, then how were two of the more prominent sins of the day-slavery and the slave trade-to be explained? Between 1775 and 1800, the most notable of Edwards's New Divinity heirs struggled with the issue. Ma…
Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles, and Beyond, 1700-1990
The American Enlightenment in Africa: Jefferson's Colonizationism and Black Virginians' Migration to Liberia, 1776-1840
The American Enlightenment in Africa: Jefferson’s Colonizationism and Black Virginians’ Migration to Liberia, 1776–1840 John Saillant (bio) To emancipate all slaves born after the passing of the act. . . . They should continue with their parents to a certain age, then to be brought up, at the public expense, to tillage, arts, or sciences, according to their geniuses, till the females should be eighteen, and the males twenty-one years of age, when…
Traveling in Old and New Worlds with John Jea, the African Preacher, 1773–1816
Nineteenth-century exslave narratives allow us to understand the way in which freedmen, freedwomen, and runaways experienced and enjoyed liberty. In such narratives, liberty, naturally enough, it seems, is the opposite of slavery. Once free, one was no longer a slave. Yet we should view this understanding of slavery and freedom as a problem in itself, as a rhetorical and time-bound use of the notions of enslavement and liberty. This article argue…
Antiguan Methodism and Antislavery Activity: Anne and Elizabeth Hart in the Eighteenth-Century Black Atlantic
Around 1790, two young sisters born into a slaveholding free black family began instructing Antiguan slaves in literacy and Christianity. The sisters, Anne (1768-1834) and Elizabeth (1771-1833) Hart, first instructed their father's slaves at Popeshead-he may have hired them out rather than using them on his own crops-then labored among enslaved women and children in Antiguan plantations and in towns and ports like St. John's and English Harbour. …
Birth of the Nation: The First Federal Congress, 1789-1791 First Federal Congress Project
An African's Life: The Life and Times of Olaudah Equiano, 1745-1799
Freedom's Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers
This book is a contextual biography of Richard Allen (1760–1831), minister (ordained in 1799 by Francis Asbury), first bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (founded in 1816), and defender of black rights in religion and society. Several substantial documents survive to help us understand Allen's life: a narrative, co-authored with Absalom Jones, of the yellow fever that plagued Philadelphia in 1793; an autobiography dictated shortly b…
Edward Countryman. Enjoy the Same Liberty: Black Americans and the Revolutionary Era
This book appears in an African American history series aimed at non-specialists and dedicated to bridging popular and academic history. The meat of the book (pp. 31–124) examines black history from 1770 to 1831, emphasizing the black men and black women who resisted and criticized slavery. Documents (pp. 125–169), with the most recent, by President Barack Obama, dating from 2008, constitute examples. The thrust of Edward Countryman's argument is…
Afro-Virginian History and Culture
Make a Black Life, and Bid It Sing: Sacred Song in The Life, History, and Unparalleled Sufferings of John Jea
Scholarship on the American-born Afro-British author John Jea (c. 1773–after 1817) has focused on his c. 1816 autobiography. Scholars have examined Jea's life a sailor, his literacy, his opposition to slavery, and his indifference to dependent or marginalized people, whether free or enslaved. This essay argues that Jea's 1816 Collection of Hymns should be read as a companion to his memoir. When the two books are read together, scholars gain a cle…
Sexuality at the Northern Border of Early African American Print Culture
This essay attributes an 1815 condemnation of fornication, published in Vermont, to Lemuel Haynes (1753-1833). Redressing a deficit of scholarly attention to sexuality in early African American print culture, it contextualizes Haynes's document within a spectrum of similar texts, and notes the variety of print culture instruments available to early African American authors, including anonymous publication, financial subscription, and publishing u…
The Memoirs of Toussaint and Isaac Louverture: Representing the Black Masculine Subject in Narratives of Mourning and Loss by Arthur F. Saint-Aubin
Reviewed by: The Memoirs of Toussaint and Isaac Louverture: Representing the Black Masculine Subject in Narratives of Mourning and Loss by Arthur F. Saint-Aubin John Saillant The Memoirs of Toussaint and Isaac Louverture: Representing the Black Masculine Subject in Narratives of Mourning and Loss. By Arthur F. Saint-Aubin. Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2015. ISBN 978-1-61146-195-4. 237 pp. $88 hardcover. Arthur F. Saint-Aubin has writte…
The Invisible Man of Indecency: Profanity and the Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African (1782)
This essay analyses vulgarities in Ignatius Sancho's letters, which were collected and published posthumously (in 1782) by one of his correspondents to provide revenue for Sancho's widow and children. It proposes a role for Sancho in English letters never previously suggested: that he used sexual innuendo in the manner of Swift, Sterne and London playwrights to spur a number of patrons and benefactors to provide gifts of money, food and other nec…
Notes and Documents: An 1815 Latin Dissertation on Hysteria by ‘Coloured’ Trinidadian John-Baptiste Philip
Blood from the Sky: Miracles and Politics in the Early American Republic
Black Letters Close the Eighteenth Century
This chapter argues that eighteenth-century African Atlantic authors perceived in the lives of Black people, distorted and destroyed by the slave system, a chaos that could be understood, protested, and then converted into a transition to a better Black world. The key to this understanding was Reformed Christian religion, and the guides to this transition were supposed to be religiously informed writers. Texts of early African Atlantic authors tr…
A sailor’s kin: Faith, sexuality, and antislavery, 1840–1856
An 1856 Black-authored autobiography, The Life of John Thompson, made significant advances in the genre of the American slave narrative. A runaway slave, whaler, folk theologian, and, ultimately, abolitionist author, Thompson expressed sympathy for a queer man trapped in slavery and sold away from the family and friends, almost certainly for purposes of sexual abuse by white men. Moreover, Thompson narrated a religious journey beginning with trad…
Walking as Englishmen and running as Africans in 1830s Trinidad
History (17 works) · Political science (16 works) · Law (14 works) · American Constitutional Law and Politics (12 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Art (10 works) · History (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Literature (8 works)