In Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African, Ignatius Sancho, demonstrates his education, his Christianity, his morality, and many other traits that contradict what most Europeans assumed "Negurs" (128) to be. It was the predominant ideology in eighteenth-century Britain that blacks are immoral and unrefined people who lack mental abilities. Africanness describes the supposed inferiority of black races. The prejudice against blacks, a designation which in eighteenth-century British context describes all non-white people, including people from India, Africa, and the Caribbean, is what I tag Africanness. Sancho was thus turned into the object of abolitionist argument he became a specimen to illustrate and validate the larger abolitionist discourse, and in the process lost the character of an independent person.
His multivalent self-characterization, however, was in the publication of his letters reduced to the singular identity of “An African”: a black man and a former slave whose example argued for abolition. The wide range of personae that Sancho marshaled in his letters allowed him to create positions of agency and authority by inducing his correspondents to reconsider or act against their culture’s preconceptions.
In practice, however, it actually compromised Sancho’s bid for self-determined characterization in his correspondence. According to his editors, this publication was designed to decry the injustices of slavery by demonstrating Sancho’s intellectual accomplishments. In this article I discuss an important event in the emergence of discourses of racial identity and racial character within the early abolitionist movement: the posthumous publication of the Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, An African (1782).
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