Whether they wanted to be or not, these Black authors were engaged in—one could say trapped in, forced into—a complex act of “representing,” functioning as synecdoches for the race. Frederick Douglass understood this, referring to himself as “the ‘representative’ of the ‘black race.’ ”[29] Phillis Wheatley was the Negro, the African. One solitary and quite vulnerable individual was made to stand for, or represent, the entire group—in this case, an entire continent of human beings.
