SOURCE: Nussbaum, Felicity A. “Being a Man: Olaudah Equiano and Ignatius Sancho.” In Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic, edited by Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould, pp. 54-71. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2001.

In the following essay, Nussbaum considers how Sancho and another eighteenth-century Black writer, Olaudah Equiano, engaged and revised prevailing gendered stereotypes of male Blackness.

I offer here the history of neither a saint, a hero, nor a tyrant.

Olaudah Equiano

Aphra Behn's description of Oroonoko's partially classical, partially African features has become quite familiar to students of Restoration and eighteenth-century England. The royal slave's ideal physique, Roman nose, piercing eyes, and finely shaped mouth are reminiscent of the most elegant Greek and Roman statues, except for the blight of his color: “His face was not of that brown, rusty black which most of that nation are, but a perfect ebony, or...