Olaudah Equiano Research Articles

Where was Gustavus Vassa, also Known as Olaudah Equiano, Born? Revisiting an Old Question

ABSTRACT Considerable controversy has prevailed over where the person usually known as Olaudah Equiano, but virtually always referred to as Gustavus Vassa in his own time, was born: whether in Africa as he claimed, or in South Carolina, which two documents seem to suggest. Following his own stated preference and virtually all references, he is referred to here as Gustavus Vassa. It is argued that ‘Essaka’, which he said was his home, is to be identified with Usaka in Abia State, Nigeria. Confirmation comes from the fact that Usaka was the home of the Ariam clan, which was one of four clans in a confederation known as Ikwuano, the other three clans being Oboro, Ibere, and Oloko. Vassa’s first name Olaudah is a name found elsewhere in Igboland, meaning ‘loud voice’, while his second name relates to the confederation where his father appears to have been a senator which Vassa wrote as Equiano. The location of Usaka 40 km west of Arochukwu, 30 km south of Bende, and 25 km from Umuahia, now the capital of Abia State, appears to be in the charming vale to which Vassa alludes in The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African.

Standpoint epistemology, internal critique, and the characterization of Equiano as an Enlightenment thinker

ABSTRACT This article shows that Olaudah Equiano’s struggles to escape from the condition of enslavement allowed him to attain a privileged epistemic position in relation to certain domains of knowledge. Equiano utilized this privileged epistemic vantage point to launch an internal critique of some strands of Enlightenment philosophy. In the process of launching this internal critique, Equiano also undermined a claim to ownership that was implicitly made by prominent defenders of both slavery and theories of racial superiority in relation to the normative principles which constituted the core of the Enlightenment as an intellectual movement. This article shows that to think of Enlightenment discourse in terms of the trope of the “master’s tools” is to misunderstand what Equiano brought about by way of successful internal critique in his Interesting Narrative.

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.

The Slave Narrative and the Modern Constitution: Latourian Agency in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano

This essay demonstrates that Bruno Latour’s work can shed light on an important genre of social and literary history: the slave narrative. Reading The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself (1789) alongside Latour’s texts including We Have Never Been Modern (1991) and Reassembling the Social (2005), I argue that Equiano’s Interesting Narrative can be interpreted as a rejection of and corrective to what Latour calls the “modern constitution,” the idea of a divide between the human and the nonhuman, that served to justify European oppression of nonhumans both literal and merely legal and figurative. By demonstrating how Equiano, like Latour, highlights the agency of not only enslaved humans but also nonhuman entities, this reading suggests that the slave narrative is not only a political form but also potentially an ecological form.

Ephemeral Improvement: Interactive Print and the Material Texts of Early Abolitionism

AbstractThis article argues that a reliance on material texts tied to the concept of improvement—such as picturesque engravings, diagrams, and account books—pushed the early abolitionist movement toward a reforming, ameliorationist ethic that disavowed revolutionary action and immediate emancipation. Although the term improvement had broad social applicability by the late eighteenth century, its original connections to land management made it an especially important concept for the abolitionist debate. Integrating book history with studies of enslavement and abolition, I show how abolitionists’ use of visual-textual forms such as diagrams and account books created an emphasis on gradual improvement. In response, Black abolitionists both emphasized concepts other than improvement and presented their works in different material forms. Olaudah Equiano and Quobna Ottabah Cugoano adapted the genre of autobiography to demonstrate how their own ostensible improvements did not have the effects anticipated by the logic of white abolitionists, ultimately undercutting the usefulness of improvement as a guiding concept for abolitionism.

Police Time: Equiano, Blackness, and Custody

Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789) highlights the role that police power plays in restricting Black people from accessing “liberal time,” a conception of temporality that is teleological and invests individuals with potential for growth and development. The literary component of this temporality is the genre of autobiography and Bildungsroman. I argue that police power, through careful regulation of Black bodies and their relation to time and narration, make liberal time possible. Episodes in Equiano’s narrative draw attention to this regulation, which I call “police time”: a conception of temporality that sees Blackness as devoid of history, a vagrant emptiness that is capable of disrupting the liberal order and its “peace,” and hence needs to be “suspended.” Building on Equiano scholarship about autobiography, the possible fabrication of his own past, and police power, I read Equiano’s narrative as confronting police time and trying to fill the void that police see in his Blackness with a history instead.

God Lives in the Sun: The Critique of Evangelical Abolitionism in William Blake's “The Little Black Boy”

ABSTRACT Late eighteenth-century narratives of enslavement were, for London readers such as William Blake, an “authentic” source of information about the British Empire's slave trade—the horrors of the Middle Passage, the humanity of the peoples who found themselves in chains, the wonder of the distant lands from which they were ripped. From the 1770s, such texts had begun to give accounts of spiritual redemption through conversion to Christianity, thus legitimizing the voice of the author within European discourse. This essay focuses on one particularly prominent example, Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative (1789), and examines the possibility that Blake's “The Little Black Boy” (1789) is a direct and critical response. The essay argues that Blake's poem speaks not with conventional abolitionist rhetoric, nor with oft-suggested ambiguity, inconsistency, or racism, but rather with intense criticism of the Eurocentric evangelical discourse that came to inform abolitionist campaigns and of the resultant African-European voice constructed in texts such as The Interesting Narrative. In particular, the distorted heaven depicted in the poem is seen as sardonically imitating the liminal space occupied by the African in London—between freedom and slavery, between pastoral religiosity and institutional Protestantism.

Evolution of Anti-Slavery Sentiments From 1776 to 1865 & a Critique of Reparations

Slavery existed in pre-modern societies throughout the world. While enslaving other peoples in most civilizations was legal, only Western civilization developed a moral revulsion against it. Therefore, the United States dialogue about slavery and reparations should focus on recognizing the 4000 years of slavery that ended through the efforts of abolitionists and their allies. The American abolitionist movement was fueled by a diverse group of individuals, including Quaker abolitionists, women’s rights activists, and influential figures like Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Martin Delany. The moral and political philosophies of Kant, Mill, Nietzsche, and Hegel also influenced the abolitionist movement with ideas about the inherent worth and dignity of human beings, individual liberty, and freedom, shaping the abolitionist movement’s vision of a future without slavery. This led to a Civil War which was the catalyst for ratifying a U.S. Constitutional Amendment in 1865 that eliminated slavery nationwide. In 2019, discussions resurfaced about reparations for slavery, raising questions about justice, individual responsibility, and the potential impact on social cohesion.

Introduction: Black women dancing through time and space

The Journal of American CultureEarly View ORIGINAL ARTICLE Introduction: Black women dancing through time and space Katrina Thompson Moore, Corresponding Author Katrina Thompson Moore [email protected] Correspondence Katrina Thompson Moore Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this authorKwakiutl L. Dreher, Kwakiutl L. DreherSearch for more papers by this author Katrina Thompson Moore, Corresponding Author Katrina Thompson Moore [email protected] Correspondence Katrina Thompson Moore Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this authorKwakiutl L. Dreher, Kwakiutl L. DreherSearch for more papers by this author First published: 12 June 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/jacc.13466Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL References Allen, Zita. “ What is Black Dance?” The Black Tradition in Modern Dance American Dance Festival Booklet 1988, pp. 22– 23. Aston, Elaine. An Introduction to Feminism and Theater. Routledge, 1994. Bobo, Jacqueline. Back Feminist Cultural Criticism. Wiley-Blackwell, 2001. Brown, Jayna. Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern. Duke University Press, 2008. Caris, Clifton, and Pamela Scully. Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography. Princeton University Press, 2008 Craighead, Clare. “‘Black dance’: Navigating the politics of ‘black’ in relation to ‘the dance object’ and the body as discourse.” Critical Arts, Vol. 20, No. 2, November 2007, pp. 16– 33, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/02560040608540452. Duquesne, Abraham. A New Voyage to the East-Indies in the Years 1690 and 1691. Dring, 1696. Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or, Gustavus Vassa, the African. Broadview Press, 2001. Harris, Hunter. "How Did Megan Thee Stallion Become the Next Hottest Rapper Out of Texas". Vulture, 25 April , 2019. https://www.vulture.com/2019/04/megan-thee-stallion-profile-big-ole-freak.html Henderson, Carol E. “Introduction: On First Ladies, Duchesses, and Bawses—Black Womanhood Rebooted.” The Journal of American Culture, vol. 42. no. 1, pp. 3– 9. https://doi.org/10.1111/jacc.12969 Ira, Petiri. “Have you Assessed Your Misogynoir?: Society's Evident Hatred towards Black Women.” Age of Awareness, 7 Jan. 2021, https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/have-you-assessed-your-misogynoir-9873060fcd42 Lizzo “The Black history of twerking—and how it taught me self love.” TED Talk, September 2021, www.ted.com/talks/lizzo_the_black_history_of_twerking_and_how_it_taught_me_self_love. Accessed 22 April 2023. Megan Thee Stallion. “Body.” Good News. 300 Entertainment. 2020. Moclassified. “Source Exclusive: Megan Thee Stallion Talks ‘Tina Snow’ EP & Her Alter Ego Being the Female Pimp C.” The Source, 10 July 2018, https://thesource.com/2018/07/10/megan-thee-stallion-ep/. Modan, Naaz. “The Story Behind Megan Thee Stallion's Name.” Nicki Swift, 14 Apr. 2020, https://www.nickiswift.com/201016/the-story-behind-megan-thee-stallions-name/. Outram, Dorinda. The Enlightenment. Cambridge University Press, 2019. Smith, Christopher J. Dancing Revolution: Bodies, Space, & Sound in American Cultural History. University of Illinois Press, 2019. Takiyah Nur Amin, “A Terminology of Difference: Making the Case for Black Dance in the 21st Century and Beyond.” The Journal of Pan African Studies, Vol. 4, No. 6, Sept 2011, pp. 7– 15. Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A306357796/LitRC?u=anon~fc0e36c9&sid=bookmark-LitRC&xid=c649be2f. Accessed 23 April 2023. Thorpe, Edward. Black Dance. Overlook TP, 1994. Welsh-Ashante, Kariamu. African Dance: An Artistic, Historical, and Philosophical Inquiry. Africa World Press, 1995. Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue ReferencesRelatedInformation

Almost Dead: Slavery and Social Rebirth in the Black Urban Atlantic, 1680–1807 by Michael Dickinson (review)

Reviewed by: Almost Dead: Slavery and Social Rebirth in the Black Urban Atlantic, 1680–1807 by Michael Dickinson Sophie Hess (bio) Keywords Slavery, Social death, Middle Passage, Atlantic world Almost Dead: Slavery and Social Rebirth in the Black Urban Atlantic, 1680–1807. By Michael Dickinson. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2022. Pp. 216. Cloth, $114.95; paper, $24.95.) The published narratives of former bondspeople are some of the most comprehensive and detailed accounts of slavery in existence. These sources can also provoke thorny debates among scholars. Often written and published in collaboration with antislavery movements, these texts have sometimes been questioned for the ways that they might distort experiences of enslavement. In Almost Dead: Slavery and Social Rebirth in the Black Urban Atlantic, 1680–1807, Michael Dickinson skillfully confronts these critiques, arguing for historians to regard enslavement narratives as "worthwhile historical evidence," which have received "disproportionate scrutiny" in comparison with white authors (7). Dickinson's choice to center these narratives is powerful. What results is a deeply researched and person-centered narrative of individual and community survival amid forced migrations and resettlements throughout the Atlantic world. The book's title subverts Orlando Patterson's theory of social death, a tactic of control employed by enslavers through family separations, name changes, and other acts of alienation.1 While Patterson saw enslaved people as permanently damaged by this violence, Dickinson expands on the work of scholars like Stephanie Smallwood and Vincent Brown, who use social death as a point of departure. Although enslavement was doubtlessly an experience of rupture, these scholars have suggested that despite the threat of social death, enslaved people fought to adapt and maintain networks of care in order to survive. While others whose work touches upon rebirth have focused more closely on specific locations or spaces of bondage, Almost Dead characterizes rebirth as a geographic and temporal process that developed as bondspeople were forced to migrate across oceanic routes and between port cities. Dickinson's text centers movement. The book examines the Middle Passage, as well as journeys between Bridgetown, Kingston, and Philadelphia, considering these cities for their centrality to trade networks. Philadelphia, which Dickinson notes has been traditionally thought of by early Americanists as "a hub of black freedom," also must be understood [End Page 332] as a space of pervasive enslavement, "a hub bondage akin to West Indian cities" (4). The book follows the routes taken by enslaved people in published narratives, noting the points where captivity was "superimposed" upon them, as evidenced even through their names: "Olaudah Equiano to Gustavus Vassa—Akeiso to Florence Hall—Broteer Furro to Venture Smith—Boyrereau Brinch to Jeffrey Brace" (58). Brace's experiences flow through every section of the work, providing it with narrative structure. Though rooted in these texts, the book is also full of also sharp research maneuvers, like detailed analysis of newspapers, maps, and legal records, which build more expansive portraits of Dickinson's subjects. Dickinson contends that memory itself provided a defense against attempts to exterminate pre-bondage identity. Speaking about Florence Hall, Dickinson asserts that through her "testimony," or remembrances of the past, she continued to hold on to her selfhood. In this way, Hall "thwarted" the totality of social death (58). By focusing on identity preservation, Almost Dead allows writers like Brace and Hall a measure of breathing room not always provided in history. Dickinson is less directly concerned with deliberate actions taken to struggle for freedom, and instead, more attentive to the ways that people caught in slavery's web made sense of themselves, their experiences, and their communities. Emotion, particularly grief, plays an essential thematic and methodological role in this work. The stirring final chapter, "A Feast of Grief Eased Our Swollen Hearts," examines how shared emotional experiences helped enslaved people to sustain and protect one another. The title comes from Brace's recollections. After witnessing the death of a fellow enslaved person in Bridgetown, the victim's brother and Brace cried together, finding strength in companionship and catharsis. Dickinson argues that "remembrances of what captives lost served as the bedrock for the new relationships people of African descent developed throughout the Black Atlantic" (116). Almost Dead is a deeply...

Sklaverei und Philosophiegeschichtsschreibung

AbstractThis article is dedicated to a topic that has been largely neglected in the historiography of philosophy to date: the position of philosophers towards the institution of slavery. Especially in survey works on the history of philosophy, positions on slavery and colonial conquest are not addressed, but have so far only been discussed in a few individual studies. From the beginning of European expansion, however, philosophical and political theories no longer emerged independently of these developments, as the expansion forced reflection on how to deal with the conquered regions and peoples, and thus on the problematic sides of the ‘voyages of discovery’: land grabbing, subjugation and slavery. Such entanglements are briefly explained using John Locke as an example. In view of the “colonial ensnarement of the Enlightenment” (Elberfeld) and the need for a critical examination of it, I propose as a methodological approach to include texts by thinkers of African origin, who had first-hand experiences of the institution of slavery and critically reflected on their own social position, the social and political conditions of their time as well as moral questions. Using three selected Black thinkers, the poet Phillis Wheatley (1753–1784), the abolitionist Olaudah Equiano (1745–1797) and the theologian Jacobus Elisa Johannes Capitein (ca. 1717–1747), I discuss the relevance of texts by former slaves for the historiography of philosophy.

Denmark Vesey’s Bible: The Thwarted Revolt That Put Slavery and Scripture on Trial by Jeremy Schipper

Reviewed by: Denmark Vesey’s Bible: The Thwarted Revolt That Put Slavery and Scripture on Trial by Jeremy Schipper Jason R. Young Denmark vesey’s Bible: The Thwarted Revolt That Put Slavery and Scripture on Trial. By Jeremy Schipper. (Princeton, N.J., and Oxford, U.K.: Princeton University Press, 2022. Pp. xxxiv, 181. $26.95, ISBN 978-0-691-19286-4.) In 1822, Denmark Vesey, a formerly enslaved man living in Charleston, South Carolina, fomented an ill-fated insurrectionary plot against slavery. Subsequent court records make clear that Vesey was convinced (and successfully convinced others) of the incommensurability of slavery and Christianity. Perhaps more important, Vesey found in the Bible justification for the violent overthrow of the system. In Denmark vesey’s Bible: The Thwarted Revolt That Put Slavery and Scripture on Trial, Jeremy Schipper offers a novel account of the Vesey plot through a close reading of extant court records, sermons, newspapers, and personal papers. Much of this material implies that Vesey appealed to biblical texts to justify his use of violence, but the particulars of his antislavery theology remain shrouded in mystery. Schipper hopes to reconstruct something of the biblical verses and interpretations that Vesey might have relied on in support of a general slave uprising. Part of Schipper’s challenge, of course, was that “no writings by Vesey survive” (p. xxix). Indeed, as Schipper observes, “slaveholders’ extensive writings related to Vesey from the early 1820s provide much more documentation of their own use of the Bible to condemn his plot than of Vesey’s use of it to support his plot” (p. xxix). Despite its publication at the two hundredth anniversary of Vesey’s conspiracy, Denmark vesey’s Bible reads primarily as a review of early- nineteenth-century proslavery Christian thought. As a result, the title does little to convey either the contents or the basic framing of the book. To be sure, Schipper offers a close reading of antislavery Christian theology, especially in a convincing review of arguments related to Exodus 21:16. Still, proslavery Christian ideologues take center stage in this book. [End Page 350] In part, this focus reflects the author’s reliance on written and textual sources. Many African Americans living during the era of slavery experienced the Bible as an aural or oral scripture rather than as a literary text. It is quite possible, then, that Denmark Vesey’s Bible—that is, the textual sources from which Vesey drew inspiration—was only partially located in the text itself. Because enslaved African Americans were largely prohibited from accessing literacy, the Bible was, for many Black people living in the South, less a book to be read and more a series of stories to be told and songs to be sung, often outside the purview of the slaveholding class. One thinks here of Olaudah Equiano’s Talking Book episode. In this sense, Vesey’s Bible might be better located outside the authorized textuality of court records, printed sermons, or legal treatises. In the concluding pages of Denmark vesey’s Bible, Schipper argues that his book “has told a story of some early efforts—both hopeful and horrific—to define and control the Bible’s implications in the midst of racial terror and violence in an American city” (p. 127). He notes, “We could ask who interpreted the Bible correctly: Vesey and his fellow conspirators or proslavery apologists” (p. 127). Instead, Schipper proposes a curious equivalency in which Vesey as well as his proslavery adversaries “were not as invested in determining what the Bible means in the abstract as they were in what it implies for the deadly struggle against or the brutal enforcement of American white supremacy” (p. 127). But the violent, if authorized, theology of proslavery ideologues was in no way equivalent—either in its ethics or its effects—to the revolutionary theology of Denmark Vesey and his co-conspirators. The differences between these two positions are perhaps nowhere more elegantly described than in the keen distinctions Frederick Douglass drew between the slaveholding Christianity of the United States and “the Christianity of Christ” (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass [Boston, 1845], p. 118). As a final word on the Bible’s relationship...

Retrofuturist Speculations: Race as Technology in Olaudah Equiano’s Vision of a Future

Since the 1789 publication of his autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, The African. Written by Himself, Olaudah Equiano’s identity has confounded critics. While competing accounts of his origins certainly raise questions, his autobiography is best read, not as a reflection on transatlantic slavery, but as a retrofuturistic speculation of a future that never was. Within the vein of Africana science fiction and futurism, we can elucidate the ways Equiano self-styled his identity, using Beth Coleman’s notion of race as technology to hypothesize an innovative heuristic of global blackness that situated his identity in concurrent systems of Black being. Through this lens, we can also better understand how critics’ historicization of Equiano’s account reify current notions of Black identity.

Counterstorying as Shining a Light: Teaching about Slavery through Narratives

The article critiques schools’ current reification and overreliance on teaching slavery as a history of exceptional individuals and unbroken progress toward freedom. The authors explore how the counterstorying of narratives of formerly enslaved individuals in both preservice and inservice education coursework complicates and engages the histories and legacies of slavery. Thomas’ frame for critical race counterstorying (2020) and critical literacy (Janks 2013) form the theoretical lens for countering curricular violence. The authors focus on The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano as representative of the current canonical frame, then introduce interviews with formerly enslaved African Americans from the Federal Writers Project, Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon, and the graphic novel Abina and the Important Men by Trevor Getz and Liz Clarke to demonstrate how counterstorying slavery shines a light on power and resistance.

Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean: Waterscapes of Labor, Conservation, and Boundary Making

Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean: Waterscapes of Labor, Conservation, and Boundary Making

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.

Affective Profit

Affective Profit

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.

Teaching Mary Wollstonecraft's Travelogue of Historical Trauma

Abstract: I teach Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) in an undergraduate English literature course on “Survival Narratives of the Eighteenth Century” at the University of California, Davis. The aim of this course is to show how significant perilous voyages were to the ways in which writers in eighteenth-century Britain imagined and interpreted their world. The course draws from the burst of new scholarship on rethinking the traditional “rise of the novel” narrative in imperial, oceanic, and global contexts and develops interpretive frameworks for the eighteenth century’s changing relationship to commerce and exploration. Wollstonecraft’s travelogue is the final text in a syllabus that begins with Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and continues with Phillis Wheatley’s poetry about ocean voyages and Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789). Wollstonecraft’s account of traveling in Scandinavia, written in the aftermath of the French Revolution, is more concerned with the survival of the human species than the survival of the individual. But reading Wollstonecraft’s travelogue in a course on survival narratives primes students to understand how the material conditions of reading and writing—often taking place under extreme circumstances—shaped the literature being produced in the eighteenth century. In this essay, I describe a metacognitive exercise in which students reflected on Wollstonecraft’s meditation on survival in an era of environmental catastrophe with their own “travelogues” written from where they logged into the Zoom classroom. With classes online at the time due to COVID-19, many of my students drew on this lesson to discuss how a moment of crisis shaped their skills and experiences as writers.

Olaudah Equiano’s Biography: Fact or/and Fiction

Abstract This article analyzes the documentation available in an attempt to settle the controversy over the “true” date and place of birth of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavo Vassa, the African. Several original documents are analyzed, and the data is compared to the information provided by the author himself in his The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself, first published in London, in 1789. According to these documents (a baptismal record and a muster book), he was not born in Africa, in Igboland (in today’s Nigeria) as he argued in his autobiography, but in South Carolina, as he declared before those who recorded the information in the official documents. The issue of authenticity is more relevant for historical research than for literary criticism; in the case of the latter, the accuracy of the data does not significantly impact upon the literary value of his work. In conclusion, the dispute is pertinent only in the liminal space where the two contexts (historical research and literary analysis) overlap, and it currently operates with information whose relevance and usefulness depend on the framework against which it is judged.