Recasting Africanness: Ignatius Sancho and the Question of Identity

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. Africanness describes the supposed inferiority of black races. It was the predominant ideology in eighteenth-century Britain that blacks are immoral and unrefined people who lack mental abilities. 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. Caught between identities—African, slave, immigrant, Briton—Sancho represents an insider-outsider observer of British culture and literature. This paper focuses on Sancho’s demonstration of refinement and intelligence as factors that strategically situate him as a man who defines, belies and redefines Africanness to his society, setting the stage for the anti-racism discourse that followed his death