Equiano's Interesting Narrative Research Articles

Late Smith and the African's War Dance: Contested Values and Temporalities In Liberal Aesthetics

Abstract: Adam Smith's often overlooked "Of the Nature of that Imitation which Takes Place in What Are Called the Imitative Arts" (1795) reveals his innovative understanding of the overlaps and conflicts in valuation in the emerging discourses of aesthetics, moral philosophy, and political economy. Placing his praise for an African performing a war-dance in the context of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory and representations of Africans (including Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative [1789]) clarifies current debates over the viability of liberal modes of valuation and cultural pluralism in a post-Enlightenment world grappling with the implications of imperialist violence, especially the Transatlantic trade in enslaved people.

Equiano's African Methodist Appetite: Feasting and Purification Rituals as Community and Resistance

Abstract: This article draws on food studies, religious history, and research on Equiano's religious orientation to argue that Equiano's Interesting Narrative describes a creolized African and Methodist asceticism in relation to food and ritual practice. His introduction to the Moravian-Methodist love feast before his conversion resonates with his earlier textual recollections of commensality and feasting practices in his eastern Nigerian homeland. Equiano's early textual descriptions of feasting rituals suggest that he was attracted to Methodism because of his experiences through the Middle Passage and his memories of feasting practices, purification rites, and sacrifices and offerings from his childhood in Igboland. Equiano's experiences of sacrifice and his portrayals of hunger and hunger strikes as a form of resistance on the slave ships mark his choice of religious and ascetic orientation. His reclamation of the ocean as a free Black sailor, an Atlantic Creole, contributes to his interest to a temperate Methodist orientation and inner-worldly asceticism.

Olaudah Equiano and Freedom of the Scenes: Embodied Performances in Equiano's Interesting Narrative

Abstract: This article considers Equiano's turn to performance and spectacle in his Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano in relation to the eighteenth-century stage practice known as "freedom of the scenes." Widely regarded as the "prototype" of all subsequent slave narratives, the Narrative is infused with instances of racial mimicry, including whiteface and blackface, as well as self-fashioning through dress and style—scenes that evince potential for understanding Equiano's more radical abolitionist vision. In foregrounding race and mimicry, Equiano not only takes on the techniques of what was emerging in his lifetime as "blackface," but he reverses the dynamic, appropriating "whiteness" in whiteface acts in order to offer a sustained critique of racial injustice. By strategically positioning himself before audiences through mimicry, fashion and style, Equiano demonstrates how performance cultures help Black Atlantic subjects to constitute themselves as a people.

Olaudah Equiano's Enchantments

Abstract: Of late, much scholarship on Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative has focused either on the meaning of Equiano's Christianity in postcolonial terms or the debate over Equiano's actual place of birth. To be sure, these discussions have been illuminating in many ways, but this essay seeks to change direction in Equiana by calling attention to the enchantments that infuse Equiano's life story—the magical and miraculous events that structure the narrative of his experience and the corresponding concepts of enchanted space and time by which he interprets them. Presenting supernatural experiences as evidence of his sensibility to the enchanted substrata of the world, Equiano, I argue, attempts a counter-cartographic project of locating Africa and Africans at the center of the atlas of world history over and against the dominant British assumption that Africa had no place in the history of human civilization. To accomplish this remapping, Equiano deploys enchanted scenes rhetorically to depict Africa as central to geohistorical time. Concomitantly, in his presentation of miraculous encounters, Equiano stresses a competing hermeneutics of enchantment that sanctions his new depiction and, along with it, his calls for abolition and justice. In focusing on Equiano's sensibility to extraempirical dimensions of geography and history, I hope to provide scholars of secular and religious orientations, as well as those divided over Equiano's empirical birthplace, some ground for collaboration and new discussion.

Equiano's Shipwreck: Insurance, Risk and Peril in Plantationocene Oceans

Abstract: The 1767 shipwreck of the Nancy occupies a central place in Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative (1789); as many scholars have noted, it is not only the literal centerpiece of the textbut also a foundational rhetorical moment central to Equiano's intertwining political and theological arguments. This essay offers a reading of the shipwreck scene as a politicized redeployment of one of the foundational concepts of maritime insurance law: the "perils of the sea." As maritime insurance emerged as a central institution for eighteenth-century capitalism, legal disputes repeatedly shaped and contested the category of "the perils of the sea": dangers considered to lie outside the scope of human agency, foresight, or fault. Most infamously, the "perils of the sea" lie at the heart of Gregson v. Gilbert , the legal case that resulted from the massacre aboard theslave ship the Zong . Through both his long career as a sailor and his personal involvement with abolitionist campaigns to publicize the Zong murders, Equiano would have been deeply familiar with the contours of maritime insurance law, and this essay reads the shipwreck scene as pivotally and critically engaged with the "perils of the sea" as a category shaping the emergence of financialized risk and its elision of other modes of thinking peril, vulnerability, and the contested border between human agency and environmental threat. While much recent work in the blue humanities has called for literary scholars to attend to the ocean as an irreducible materiality that challenges anthropocentric narrations of agency, this essay argues that the logic of maritime insurance, too, relied on the invocation of "the sea" as the sublime opposite of human agency, prudence, and riskmanagement. By engaging with the "perils of the sea" and its legal construction of "the sea" in opposition to human agency, Equiano detaches racialized distributions of risk, peril, and vulnerability from the naturalizing figuration of them as attributes of "the sea" and insists that risk itself be an object of abolition struggle.

Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries: British Literature, Political Thought, and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1731–1814

Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries: British Literature, Political Thought, and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1731–1814

How Utility Pleases: Sentiment and Utility in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah EquIano

Discussions of the rhetoric of sensibility in Equiano's Interesting Narrative have had little to say about Equiano's frequent appeals to utilitarianism, which seem out of keeping with his appeals to the humanitarian feelings of his readers. I argue that these two aspects of Equiano's rhetoric are mutually reinforcing, following an eighteenth-century tradition that often conflated appeals to the feelings with considerations about utility. Sensibility, as is well known, was indebted to a moral discourse that located feeling as the source of moral recognition, but this same discourse also held that utilitarian considerations informed moral judgments. In line with this tradition, I argue, Equiano invokes the utility inherent in the abolitionist program as an integral part of his endeavor to heighten his readers' sympathy for enslaved Africans.

Emotional Persuasion in Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative

Emotional Persuasion in Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative

Emotional Persuasion in Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative

Emotional Persuasion in Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative

Teaching Eighteenth-Century British Literature beyond the Pale

Teaching Eighteenth-Century British Literature beyond the Pale Rebekah Mitsein (bio) In 2017 college students all over the country launched high profile and controversial protests against the tendency to put white art, white culture, and white aesthetics at the center of the humanities classroom. During the now infamous boycott of Humanities 110 at Reed College, for example, students took issue with the fact that the required humanities class focused largely on the translatio studii of intellectual history from the Mediterranean westward. Students argued that the class "perpetuates white supremacy—by centering 'whiteness' as the only required class at Reed."1 Whethe one agrees with these students' tactics, their complaint prodded a sore spot for those of us who teach historical literatures and whose background and training is in specifically Western literary traditions. Although surveys of eighteenth-century literature might include Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative or Phyllis Wheatley's poetry, the discipline is continually haunted by its Eurocentric canon. Even when we are teaching global or colonial texts like Oroonoko or Robinson Crusoe, we often put whiteness at the center of the curriculum, in part because it seems that our authors inevitably put whiteness at the center of their own worlds. In the spring of 2017, I taught an advanced undergraduate seminar called Global Crossroads in Eighteenth-Century British Literature, which I then taught as a graduate seminar in the spring of 2018. In these classes, I experimented with strategies to teach literature written largely by white [End Page 131] British authors from a more global perspective. I paired these canonical texts with material chosen to encourage students to consider how the discourse, narratives, knowledge, aesthetics, or material culture of non-Europeans became central to how eighteenth-century British writers represented the world (table 1). In other words, instead of starting the class from the premise that the British literary tradition invented the way Britons thought about "the global" in the eighteenth century, we examined the ways that global contact created the British literary tradition. This was a time, after all, when British travelers, readers, and writers were pushing their own intellectual, geographical, and cultural boundaries. There is no reason to assume that this global context—and the figures and discourses that animate this global context—did not have an impact on the British literary imagination. The course material I chose to illustrate the scale of these crossroads fell into three broad categories. The first category included global texts to which eighteenth-century Western readers had access, either as translations or epitomes, like the writings of early modern Arabic and North African geographers or the Ethiopian story of the Queen of Sheba retold by Hiob Ludolf and James Bruce. The second category included reports from European travel narratives of local informants describing their own cultures (embedded narratives) and reports of local arts and acts of self-representation (music, ritual, or dancing). The third category included non-alphabetic texts and material culture (art objects, artifacts, maps, textiles, goods created specifically for export to Europe, etc.). The organizational structure of the syllabus classified some texts as Western or British and others through the sweeping oppositional categories of non-Western, or non-European, which was in a way antithetical to the aims of the course; however, this structure also served as a concrete example of the paradigm the course was meant to push against and provided an opportunity to discuss the limitations of well-intentioned multicultural approaches to creating an inclusive reading list, neither of which were self-evident to my students. In other words we were not equipped to fully dispense with such geopolitical binaries, but we practiced recognizing them and then using the course readings, assignments, and discussions to sketch out alternatives to them. Students responded to prompts on Canvas (an online learning management system with a built-in discussion board) that asked them how exposure to this range of materials encouraged them to think differently about the European texts on the syllabus. For example, I paired Oroonoko with a translation of François d'Elbée's description of the luxurious Fon court at Ardra, along with lists of goods published by John Ogilby and Richard Hakluyt that were most...

Olaudah Equiano's Ecclesial World

This paper argues that Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative refashions and redeploys an eighteenth-century evangelical discourse of "primitive Christianity" in order to advocate for the end of the slave trade and the creation of an inclusive community at once British, Christian, and African. While studies of the origin of early African American literature have recognized the complex role that evangelical Christianity plays in eighteenth-century transatlantic black writing, this article shifts the focus to ecclesiology specifically, highlighting the way that Equiano grounds his appeal in contemporary thinking about the nature and purpose of religious institutions. Inspired by an evangelical preoccupation with the New Testament book of Acts, Equiano points to a diasporic first-century Christian church as a model of justice, generosity, and racial harmony. In this way, he condemns the exploitation and abuse of the transatlantic slave system and posits that a spiritual kinship that transcends racial difference should serve as the foundation of reform.

Spectacular Suffering: Witnessing Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic by Ramesh Mallipeddi

Reviewed by: Spectacular Suffering: Witnessing Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic by Ramesh Mallipeddi Morgan Vanek (bio) Ramesh Mallipeddi. Spectacular Suffering: Witnessing Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic. U of Virginia P, 2016. Pp. xiv, 265. US$49.50. Politically suspect, self-indulgent, ineffective: sentimentalism, Ramesh Mallipeddi admits, and metropolitan sympathy for slaves' suffering in particular, "has been the target of withering critique" by scholars of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world (4). In Spectacular Suffering, however, Mallipeddi invites us to reevaluate sentimental sympathy—not to recuperate this metropolitan preoccupation with the injured black body but rather to develop a new theory of slave agency that will better account for the "embodied [End Page 192] dimensions of black experience in slave narratives and in black cultural and aesthetic forms" (5). To this end, the book's first half examines scenes of physical distress in sentimental responses to slavery from metropolitan observers like Aphra Behn, Richard Steele, and Laurence Sterne, while the second turns to the less well-studied archives of slaves' representations of their own experiences of dispossession, which range from Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative and Ignatius Sancho's Letters to medical records, captains' journals, and the proceedings of parliamentary investigations of the slave trade. By reading these archives together, Spectacular Suffering demonstrates how "the emergence of actual slaves as speaking subjects in the English public sphere was . . . shaped by the discursive parameters" of the metropolitan focus on spectacular suffering (71), and how these slaves, as speaking subjects, nonetheless managed to leverage spectatorial sympathy to generate a "melancholic counterknowledge of colonial modernity" (11). With attention to the methodological challenges that necessarily attend any excavation of these fragmentary archives, Mallipeddi thus strives to shift the focus of contemporary scholarship on the Atlantic world and begins to bridge the current "chasm between recovery projects that aim to generate historical knowledge about slavery . . . and those that take corporeal dimensions of slave existence as their point of departure to trace acts of regeneration and recuperation undertaken by enslaved people themselves" (15). Meticulously researched, clearly written, and original, Spectacular Suffering delivers on this promise: Mallipeddi both exposes the troubling ways contemporary critics reproduce their metropolitan subjects' tendency to foreground spectacle and suffering and demonstrates how recentring slaves' "bodily experience as a source of knowledge" can open new avenues of inquiry about how the "ostensible objects of sentimental compassion" generated their own "affective response to . . . the commodification of their bodies" (4–6). Instructors will find Mallipeddi's first three chapters especially useful, as the book begins with compelling close readings of widely anthologized and frequently taught texts (Behn's Oroonoko, Steele's Spectator No. 11 [Inkle and Yarico], and Sterne's Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey) that demonstrate just how similar the transformations of the injured body at the centre of sentimental representations of slave distress are to the transformations of the body that underpin the commodification and punishment that characterize Atlantic slavery. In Chapter One, for instance, Mallipeddi identifies Oroonoko as a "foundational" illustration of this dynamic (47), weaving together research on the conventions of heroic drama, the logic of the fetish, and the processes of trade and mercantilist exchange to expose "the changing valences of the black body as a consequence of its commodification" (50). In Chapter [End Page 193] Two, Mallipeddi takes a similar approach, combining Jürgen Habermas' and Michael Warner's analyses of the public sphere with a close study of the heroic epistle (or lover's complaint) to argue that, in Steele's Spectator No. 11, the sympathy the heroic epistle makes available to Yarico, its heroine, emerges only "via a bracketing of racial slavery," by foregrounding her abandonment rather than her enslavement (70). By tracing this move through the many adaptations Steele inspired, furthermore, Mallipeddi discovers that this gesture also tightly circumscribed the sympathy available to Mary Prince, whose nineteenth-century History of her own enslavement was censored for acknowledging any forms of freedom she found within either slavery or sexual relationships; like the fictional Yarico, Mallipeddi observes, Prince is authorized to vouch for her experience as a woman or a slave, but not both. More striking, Mallipeddi finds that contemporary critical emphasis on the auction...

Crossroads of the Imagination: A Possible Musical Origin for the Character of Jupiter in Poe’s “The Gold-Bug”

Just after the turn of the century, I was in my university's library, browsing through old collections of traditional American folk music. That particular semester, I was teaching several sections of English composition and American literature before 1900. In the latter, I assigned cheap and accessible Dover editions of our authors, giving my students the original texts long in the public domain and free from expert commentary, so they could form their own opinions about the readings (or so I hoped). One of our authors was Edgar Allan Poe, and one of our assigned readings was Gold-B ug (1843). I should also mention that a few years earlier, I had finished my doctoral dissertation on Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, where in one of my chapters (and at various points throughout the manuscript), I had examined that novel from the perspective of slave narratives, such as Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative, Frederick Douglass's Narrative, Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery, as well as W. E. B. Du Bois's narrative The Souls of Black Folk, and their respective historical contexts. I had also spent a great deal of time with Ellison's other writings, such as his essay Twentieth-C entury Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity.The musical collection I was holding was an edition of Ira W. Ford's Traditional Music of America. (I was, at the time, searching for old fiddle tunes and mountain for a long work then in progress.) While I tried to finger-tap my way through tunes like Ginger Blue, Molly Hare, and Possum up a Gum Stump, I stumbled across a tune that stopped my fingers cold and made my eyes bulge in Poe-like fascination and horror. The tune's title was Jubiter, and the first instance of it in Ford are the opening bars (1940a:99), followed by a page reference to the subsequent song in full, with lyrics (1940a:253):The story Old JubiterTold you and me,The night we sat underThe juniper tree.At the end of the rainbowIs what we were told,We'll each find a treasureOf bright shiny gold.ChorusOf bright shiny gold,Of bright shiny gold,Oh, where is the treasureOf bright shiny gold?1At that moment, I stood at a personal crossroads of the imagination, where my love of traditional American folk music and my knowledge of nineteenth-century American literature and, to an extent, slave narratives merged. And the nexus point was Poe's character of Jupiter.I n Gold-B ug, an unnamed narrator relates how he met and befriended one William Legrand and his former slave, Jupiter, and how the three of them uncovered Captain Kidd's buried treasure after Legrand deciphers a coded message that tells where the treasure is buried. For many readers and scholars, the heart of the tale lies in the existence of, and the solution to, the code that leads to the treasure of buried gold (Whalen 1994). For myself, I find the presence and depiction of Jupiter to be the tale's most compelling facet.Jupiter has been given short shriftby Poe scholars, who see him as only as a stereotypical docile servant (Hutchisson 2005:99), a source of comic relief (Meyers 2000:136), or proof that Poe could not reproduce black dialect (Hibbard 1926:495). Jupiter is rather a human being. In Gold-B ug, we learn that Jupiter had been manumitted, freed, by Legrand prior to the reversal of Legrand's family fortunes. Although a free man, Jupiter elects to stay with his former master, the two spending their days hunting and fishing on Sullivan's Island, isolated offthe South Carolina coast. Being free, Jupiter can move about town, as when Legrand sends him to buy supplies and to deliver a message to the narrator, and Jupiter is free to speak his mind to both men, more or less like an equal. I say this for, despite a few passages where Legrand is brusque with Jupiter, there are other passages where Jupiter is brusque with Legrand. …

Postcolonial Life Narratives: Testimonial Transactions by Gillian Whitlock

Gillian Whitlock, Postcolonial Life Narratives: Testimonial Transactions. Oxford: Oxford up, 2015. Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures Series. 242 pp. The introduction of Gillian Whitlock's Postcolonial Life Narratives: Testimonial Transactions immediately alerts readers to its impressive scope. The book successfully draws connections between life writing produced and read in disparate places at disparate times by disparate audiences in order to demonstrate the ways in which life writing can articulate the impact of conflicted human subjecthood on bodies, lives, and peoples. The book is into two parts along a temporal logic, but variations on the term divided are inappropriate descriptors for Whitlock's text, given its constant attention to unexpected connections between groups of texts. Part 1 focuses on what we might broadly call pre-contemporary case studies. Chapter 1 traces and compares the textual histories of two life narratives published in 1789: Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative and Watkin Tench's Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay. While the two texts are written from starkly different perspectives, those of an emancipated slave (Equiano) and a British Marine Officer (Tench), both offered an autobiographical account that gave witness to the previously unseen, and in turn called upon the reader to bear witness to unknown and scarcely imaginable scenes from the 'New World' (16). In chapter 2, Whitlock compares the two texts from chapter 1 to a 1796 letter from an Australian indigenous man, Woollawarre Bennelong, and argues that, similar to the first two narratives, the letter testifies to the individuality of Australian indigenous people and the dynamics of first contact. Chapter 3 analyzes Saartjie Bartman's (famed as the Hottentot Venus) 1810 argument that the freak shows in which she was featured were not exploitative but, rather, reflected her free will. This decision, in Whitlock's estimation, gives us insight into humanizing discourses in colonial modernity (36) because she refuses to be subject to discourses that frame humanitarian actions as necessarily compassionate (40). In chapter 4, Whitlock contrasts Mary Prince's 1837 History with Equiano and Bennelong's texts, arguing that the Prince's text reveals how gender and sexuality constrain the voice, embodiment, and agency that become available for women in the slave narrative (46). She further argues that Baartman and Prince's texts indicate that cultural discourses limit the extent to which women's bodies are legible in testimonial narrative. Chapter 5 turns to Susanna Moodie's Roughing it in the Bush, written between 1832 and 1852. Moodie's humanitarian sensibility and white civility reflect on her portraits of indigenous women, resulting in a portrait of the noble savage, which is implicated in discourses of indigenous peoples as a dying race (56). Chapter 6 reads what is usually identified as the first autobiography by a Canadian indigenous man, The Life, History, and Travels of Kah-ge-ga-gah-Bowh (1847). Kah-ge-ga-gah-Bowh (known in English as George Copway) testifies to traditional practices and mobilizes the Christian language of suffering to demonstrate the negative impact of the eradication of these practices by settler colonialism. Chapter 7 takes stock of the whole of Part 1 and Rousseau's Confessions into conversation with these case studies. Here, Whitlock accurately summarizes Part 1's accomplishments in mapping the opportunities provided by life writing and suggesting the various texts' ideological (humanitarian, democratic, and recognition-based) proximities to one another. Part 2 consists of four chapters that tackle contemporary case studies. Chapter 8 considers texts produced in the aftermath of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (trc), anchoring its argument in Antjie Krog's trilogy of memoirs collectively known as Country of My Skull. …

Olaudah Equiano and the Sailor's Telegraph: The Interesting Narrative and the Source of Black Abolitionism

Olaudah Equiano and the Sailor's Telegraph:The Interesting Narrative and the Source of Black Abolitionism Matthew D. Brown (bio) I. The strong presence of the sea is grossly under-examined in American literature, doubly so in African American literature.1 As Elizabeth Schultz observes, "Historically and culturally, the African American experience has been an inland one. Black Americans," she continues, "have not generally turned seaward in their literature." Although she comes to a "however" that adds the observation "the sea is not absent from African American literature," the rhetorical pose imagined in the claim that "the sea is not absent" is that it will take a good deal of searching to find it (233).2 And yet, as Jeffery Bolster observes in his ground-breaking 1997 study Black Jacks, "Sailors wrote the first six autobiographies of blacks published in English before 1800" (37).3 Many of these autobiographies carry clear abolitionist intent and hint at the type of anti-slavery discussions carried on by sailors around the Atlantic world. When scholars of African American literature turn their attention to works written by sailors, like Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavas Vassa, the African. Written by Himself (1789), most suffer from the misplaced assumption Schultz points to, and thus fail to see the crucial link between sailors and black abolitionism. Indeed, what Crispus Attucks, Paul Cuffee, Robert Smalls, Frederick Douglass, and so many other black revolutionaries in America have in common is that they were all sailors or in some other way directly connected to the maritime trades. Chinosole observes, "The temptation is strong in some criticism to tune in to only one of Equiano's voices and to silence others," and goes on to lament that the factionalization of academic disciplines has dislocated Equiano's Interesting Narrative from the contexts that can best support important new readings (10). What Chinosole highlights is a dilemma every reader of The Interesting Narrative must confront, as Equiano explicitly lists several "voices"—Olaudah Equiano, Gustavas Vassa, Jacob, Michael, Captain, Freeman—and The Interesting Narrative itself is largely about the power and possibility of controlling and shifting identities. Indeed, its very title lists a "himself" who wrote it, but confronts us with an "or" that questions the identity of "himself:" Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa. This is, of course, further complicated where "The African" seems to be appended not to Equiano's African name but rather to what he calls his "current name," Gustavus Vassa, a Swedish name he was given as a slave. Small wonder it is, indeed, that critics will "tune into only one voice." We are confronted with multiple dynamic identities and asked to sort and prioritize them. The question Chinosole seems to suggest has not so much to do [End Page 191] with which identity is the most "authentic," but rather which is it that allows Equiano to develop and, ultimately, control the others? Of The Interesting Narrative's many voices, that which is most often and most completely silenced is, indeed, that voice which speaks the loudest. After Equiano is taken captive, the voice into which every important event in his narrative is keyed is the voice of the sailor, and it is this center from which all other voices flow. The significance of this is that Equiano's forecastle sailor's voice speaks from a largely hidden source of power in anti-slavery efforts that I call the Sailor's Telegraph—a network of information that flowed through free black and enslaved sailors throughout the African Diaspora. Almost a hundred years before the electronic telegraph, the Sailor's Telegraph was a conduit of information from the world of slavery to the world of anti-slavery, without which the world of anti-slavery could not have made any progress against the institution of slavery. Since the slave trade itself as well as the slave-dependent industries related to the production and refinement of cotton and sugar were inextricably bound up with Atlantic sailor culture, the experience of slaves was readily available to sailors and the experience of sailors was, if to a slightly lesser degree, available to slaves. Equiano's experience...

The Poetics of Belonging in the Age of Enlightenment: Spiritual Metaphors of Being in Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative

Olaudah Equiano's classic 1789 autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself , uses what this study identifies as spiritual metaphors of being—figurative, theological expressions of one's sense of self that carry philosophical (ontological) undercurrents. The spiritual metaphors of being that Equiano crafted emerged from his sense of himself as a modern subject living inexorably on the edge of the many precipices of modern life and existence. In this essay I read these fluid spaces of contiguity as characteristic of the metaphors of being that indelibly mark Equiano's autobiography. Equiano's Narrative teaches us that the parallel development ofWestern nation-states and empires should not be assessed without due consideration of the continuing influence of ontotheological precepts on individual thought, in spite of the eighteenth-century decline of the church as a far-reaching, powerful institution. Equiano uses spiritual metaphors of being to resist the politics of empire, a politics that ensured that polities could never smoothly transition from empires to states, that upheaval and shifting allegiances would consistently characterize an individual's existence, and that the character of modern human being would always be of a fractured but navigable nature.

Royall Tyler's The Algerine Captive , America, and the Blind Man of Philosophy

Royall Tyler's The Algerine Captive, America, and the Blind Man of Philosophy Matthew Pangborn (bio) Royall Tyler's early-republic barbary-hostage tale, The Algerine Captive (1797), owns the distinction of being one of America's first novels and one of its least effective abolitionist texts. The story of a white American's enslavement by African pirates, based on historical events during the Washington presidency, Tyler's narrative has challenged readers desiring to rescue a compelling indictment of slavery's practice in the "Barbary states of America" from a satire that just as enthusiastically targets dueling, medical quackery, and classical education. 1 The work's reception has reflected its uneven focus. Hailed as the emergence of a "tough-minded realism" in the American imaginary and as proof the national character developed from sensibility, the novel has been criticized for its irreligion and its piety, for its didacticism as well as for its failure to sustain a "moral imperative." And it has been condemned as derivative of Roderick Random, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, Rabelais, Candide, Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative, and Montesquieu's Persian Letters, while lauded for its "intertextuality." 2 Some have suggested The Algerine Captive is not a novel at all, a suggestion I want to resist with the claim the text engages period philosophical issues that had great importance for the former colonies, ones the novel as a genre was particularly well suited to address. 3 If Tyler's text suffers from an identity crisis, in other words, it only too accurately mirrors the new nation's struggle to make a place for itself on the world stage. The Algerine Captive appeared, after all, at a desperate time in American history. Fearing contagion from the French Revolution, [End Page 1] re-absorption into the British Empire, and scalping-parties from the natives, Americans also faced internal revolutions, such as the Whiskey Revolt and Shays' Rebellion, which Tyler claimed to have played a role in ending (Tanselle 19-23). In the years leading up to and following the oppressive Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, the American experiment seemed at any moment to come undone, especially along the growing fault-line of slavery. It was in this divisive atmosphere that Barbary-captive narratives, whether factual or fictional (like Tyler's), seized the public imagination like no other subject, supplying a badly needed political cohesion. Indeed, public outcry over Muslim raiders' repeated snatching of American seamen led eventually to the Tripolitan expedition of 1801-05, America's first war against terrorism and an event that catapulted it into the first ranks of global naval powers. Tyler's tale of a young man who grows up during the War of Independence only to become enslaved on Africa's northern coast, published as the "true" story of one Updike Underhill, has been read quite rightly as trading on Americans' concern for their countrymen's distant sufferings. 4 In its examination of its audience's unifying interest in viewing such spectacle, however, the novel also explores the consequences of philosophy's and early science's own fascination with distanced seeing, one that has had an inestimable impact on American culture. Just exactly how early science's techniques of "ocular demonstration" helped shape modern Anglophone society has been the subject of continuing fruitful exchanges between the history of science and literary studies. John Barrell has shown, for example, how the seventeenth-century drive for an "equal, wide survey" of England's population resulted not merely in censuses or art conceived from a "prospect view," but a ruling class that deemed this commanding perspective its political birthright. Likewise, Mary Poovey has traced the way in which the "surveillance system" of double-entry bookkeeping contributed to a British political economy in which an ethical or theological conception of truth and value slowly gave way to an episto-factual one, which subsequent histories have identified as inherently expansionist. 5 Further studies have suggested that the creation of a spectatorial subjectivity helped develop an circum-Atlantic bourgeoisie trained in "a universal yet disinterested sympathy" (Baucom 207). According to such a formulation, repeated investment in images of suffering others in sentimental literature as well as visual and...

The Prehistory of The History of Mary Prince: Thomas Pringle's "The Bechuana Boy"

Thomas Pringle, a Scottish journalist and poet, is best known to Anglo-American scholarship for his role as editor of the first black female slave narrative to be published in Britain, The History of Mary Prince (1834). Pringle had lived in the Cape Colony from 1820 to 1826, however, and produced an important body of work that is not well known outside South Africa. The central argument of this essay is that the poem "The Bechuana Boy" (first published in 1830) has not yet been recognized as a significant precursor text of the History, even though it helps us locate the narrative as informed by a structure of thought already present in Pringle's work. I examine in particular the way in which the poem engages the notion of sympathy, especially as this derives from Adam Smith's conceptualization in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Such metropolitan notions meet their limits in the colonized subject, who may only access the circuits of sympathy by divesting himself of indigenous selfhood. In comparing "The Bechuana Boy" and The History of Mary Prince, I draw attention to shared structural and thematic features and elaborate on the affinities between these works despite their generic and other differences. The essay concludes by offering a further brief comparison between the History and Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative (1789). Working with Gayatri Spivak's notion of the "native informant," I argue that the works under examination display similarities in their understanding of the protocols governing the admission of the native informant to mainstream public discourse.

Olaudah Equiano and the Igbo World: History, Society, and Atlantic Diaspora Connections, ed. Chima J. Korieh

Reviewed by: Olaudah Equiano and the Igbo World: History, Society, and Atlantic Diaspora Connections Vincent Carretta Olaudah Equiano and the Igbo World: History, Society, and Atlantic Diaspora Connections Chima J. Korieh, Ed. Trenton, NJ: Africa World P, 2009. xiv + 407 pp. ISBN 1-59221-665-X paper. Olaudah Equiano and the Igbo World comprises seventeen essays of wide-ranging quality by nonacademic and academic authors from various disciplines. The core essays are based on papers given at a 2007 conference on Olaudah Equiano in Nigeria. The collection needs to be approached with great care because it is so poorly edited for style and content. What other than careless editing can account for sentences such as "Equiano is a fresh thesis who deserves study in issues relating to doubts and contempt of African identity and personality" (130)? Names are often misspelled, publications misattributed, and flawed, abridged, and/or modernized editions of Equiano's Interesting Narrative are frequently cited rather than the authoritative 1789 first edition or the 2003 Penguin edition. The most weakly argued contributions are among the seven essays that discuss Equiano directly. I am not an unbiased reviewer of these essays because they attack me and my editorial, critical, and biographical publications in ways I consider unprofessional. In "The Igbo Roots of Olaudah Equiano," Catherine Obianuju Acholonu describes herself as the victim of "a grand conspiracy" (56) headed by "[Chinua] Achebe apologist" Paul Edwards and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who are guilty of "defacing [her] work." According to Acholonu, because I have published baptismal and naval records that say Equiano was born in South Carolina, I am "intent on sensationalizing the whole matter" of her disputed claims that she has found Equiano's birthplace in Africa (59). She later refers to me as an "enfant terrible hungry for fame, with loads of vested interests and ulterior motives" (61). Dorothy Chinwe Ukaegbu also employs Acholonu's ad hominem tactics in two essays in Olaudah Equiano and the Igbo World, accusing me of "impugning ethnographic research results" because I have expressed skepticism about Acholonu's methodology: "Among Carretta's criticisms is the issue of the longevity of the subjects upon which Acholonu relied for evidence. According to Carretta, it is not feasible for a person to live to be one hundred and fifty years old as Acholonu had calculated in the genealogy of her Isseke data" (70). Ukaegbu concludes: "By such conduct, Carretta left himself open to possible questions about his motives and the basic intent of his work" (111). One can disagree with someone without being disagreeable, or descending to name-calling and insinuating malevolent motives. [End Page 183] Fortunately, Olaudah Equiano and the Igbo World contains several essays whose quality counterbalances that of Acholonu and Ukaegbu's pieces. These include Chima J. Korieh's "Introduction" and his "Igbo Ethnicity and Identity in the Atlantic Diaspora." One wishes, though, that Korieh and others paid more attention to what he refers to as "the problematic of Igbo identity." Adiele Afigbo's "Revolution and Reaction in Eastern Nigeria, 1900–1929: The Background to the Women's Riot of 1929" is the fullest treatment of a crucial historical event touched on by other contributors. And Douglas B. Chambers's "Igbo Women in the Early Modern Atlantic World: The Burden of Beauty" is a welcome comparison of eighteenth-century stereotypes of enslaved "Igbo" men and women. Vincent Carretta University of Maryland vac@umd.edu Copyright © 2009 Indiana University Press

Toward a Philosophy of Transnationalism

This essay suggests, first of all, that the power of transnational studies lies in its fundamentally dialectical approach, and, secondly, that this approach opens the way to a fresh consideration of the human subject of history. In the kind of transnational studies highlighted here, the focus is less strictly on the movements of people and capital across national borders and more on the implicitly other-oriented interactions between and among nations, making them mutually contingent phenomena, a situation which in turn entails intersubjective and intertextual events and calls for a fresh philosophy of the subject. Doyle draws on the thinking of Frantz Fanon, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Louis Althusser to explore one such possible transnational philosophy. The second half of the essay pursues the idea that literature offers a micro-world of the dialectics of both transnational history and existential intersubjectivity. Doyle interprets Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative in relation to each other as well as in relation to transnational Atlantic history. Such readings model a method for transnational literary studies, one grounded in philosophy as well as history.