SOURCE: Sandhu, S. S. “Ignatius Sancho and Laurence Sterne.” Research in African Literature 29, no. 4 (winter 1998): 88-105.

In the following essay, Sandhu takes issue with the view that Sancho was “obsequious,” “assimilated” to English culture, a traitor to his race, and a slavish parrot of the novelist Laurence Sterne.

The last fifteen years have seen a huge upsurge in the number and variety of books dealing with the black presence in eighteenth-century England. New histories have been written by James Walvin, Peter Fryer, Ron Ramdin, Gretchen Gerzina, and Norma Myers. New editions of slave autobiographies and other black literary texts have been published on both sides of the Atlantic by the likes of Vincent Carretta, Sandra Burr and Adam Potkay, and Paul Edwards and Polly Rewt. Much of this scholarship has percolated through to more mainstream histories of the eighteenth century and is incorporated in such works as Peter...