Difference and Accountability: Framing the Black Female Voice

Abstract

ABSTRACT The History of Mary Prince (1831) not only recounts Prince’s experience of the brutalities of life under plantation slavery, it frames that story with an extraordinary array of authenticating paratextual material (preface, supplement, footnotes and appendices) that take up more space than the core narrative itself. For this reason, scholarly attention to the narrative has been critical of Pringle’s framing of Prince’s story, claiming that the paratexts suppress, undermine or efface her black voice, even as they aim to validate that voice. Yet these readings fail to consider the ways in which the paratexts create spaces of discursive transaction that effectively foreground a process of demand and response, in which the contestations over her claims not only attest to the precarity of the black, female slave. They foreground her claims as sites of disturbance within an English public sphere anxious over its morality, thus creating a radically new kind of abolitionist text – one that remains inherently relational, foregrounding the structures of address upon which moral demands are made as those that are, in this instance, generated from a confrontation with difference and the shock of the elsewhere.