RECONSTRUCTING RACE AND FREEDOM IN ATLANTIC MODERNITY

Abstract

This essay offers a dialectically intertextual reading of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative within a reconstructed account of Atlantic race history. As such it provides one kind of answer to Paul Gilroy's call to consider “the Atlantic as one, single complex unit of analysis” in order to build a “transnational and intercultural perspective.” The essay pursues a transcultural Atlantic perspective that moves beyond strictly racial paradigms (those that would segregate, say, discussion of Anglo-British from Afro-British cultural legacies); yet it also brings into view how, paradoxically, it is in part their race narratives that link these traditions. That is, the essay argues that both black and white narratives pivot on the scene of a sea crossing and an accompanying experience of self-loss that is recuperated, ultimately, under the sign of race. Anglo-authored texts from Oroonoko to Billy Budd regularly practice what Toni Morrison calls Africanism, subsuming the African-Atlantic story within their own Atlantic freedom plots, while African-Atlantic texts directly challenge this erasure and rewrite the Atlantic story—yet also do so as the story of a race's quest for its freedom. The core historical contribution of the essay is to trace this dialectical relation between Anglo-Atlantic and African-Atlantic traditions (as the author refers to them) to the seventeenth-century revolutionary period in which the will to freedom was first defined as a racial trait. This history allows us to appreciate just how shrewdly Olaudah Equiano managed the paradoxes of the racialized Atlantic freedom quest.