Abstract: “The Text of the Context: John Marrant’s Literary Identity” argues, in relation to Marrant’s A Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, a Black that identity, blackness, and masculinity are all deeply context-dependent, and that it is difficult at best to establish any fixed meanings for those terms that transcend historical periods. There are continuities, of course, and the essay shows that the struggle for freedom that is one of the defining features of blackness in the New World is at the center of Marrant’s text. When read against Marrant’s political and speakerly activity, one can see that Marrant pragmatically strove for black freedom while also embracing a Christianity-inflected Enlightenment universalism which he did not see in contradiction to what today might be called black nationalism. Marrant pursued a broad and pragmatic vision of freedom without a confining notion of black masculinity and by embracing an African self without developing a theory of black identity.

Keywords: John Marrant, black identity, ethnicity, universalism, African