Dr. Cassander L. Smith is an associate dean of academic affairs for the Honors College and an associate professor of English at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. Her teaching and research focus on representations of Black Africans in early Atlantic literature, emphasizing the racial/cultural ideologies that helped shape English encounters with the early Americas and helped shape the literature produced about those encounters. She is the author of Black Africans in the BritishImagination: English Narratives of the Early Atlantic World (LSU Press, December 2016), which examines the role of Black Africans and race in England’s efforts to build its American empire in the 16th and 17th centuries. She also is co-author of The Earliest African American Literatures, an anthology of early Black African representations in American literature prior to 1760, which is forthcoming in December from University of North Carolina Press. In addition, she has co-edited two volumes of essays: Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018) and Teaching With Tension: Race, Reality, and Resistance in the Classroom (Northwestern University Press, 2019). Her essays have been published in several journals and edited collections, including Early American Literature and Studies in Travel Writing. In addition, she serves as the associate editor for Cambridge University Press’s 19-volume series African American Literature inTransition, which addresses transformations and continuities in African American literature from its origins to the present. Her current work in progress includes a monograph, Race and Respectabilityin Early Black Atlantic Literature, under contract with Louisiana State University Press. The book examines the ways in which issues of race, class, and morality merge in the emancipation rhetoric of an early modern black Atlantic. Her research has been funded by grants and fellowships from the University of Alabama, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Folger Shakespeare, Newberry, and Huntington libraries.
In this talk, Cassander L. Smith examines the extent to which the textual representations of Black Africans in the early Americas were shaped by respectability politics. Most scholars contend that a politics of respectability emerged out of communities of black women’s church and club movements at the end of the 19th century. Smith argues that Black communities were engaging with tenets of respectability from the very beginning of the transatlantic slave trade. She illustrates the mechanics of respectability politics in a survey of 16th – 18th century American narratives that focus on aspects of Black lives. Those texts illustrate Black African efforts to self-construct as civilized, assimilated – respectable – subjects. Their examples offer important perspectives on the role of respectability politics as a coping mechanism for Black Americans in early America.
