Olaudah Equiano Research Articles

White Men’s Magic: Scripturalization as Slavery by Vincent L. Wimbush (review)

Reviewed by: White Men’s Magic: Scripturalization as Slavery by Vincent L. Wimbush Antonio T. Bly Vincent L. Wimbush, White Men’s Magic: Scripturalization as Slavery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Pp. ix + 294. Illus. Index. $35.00. “. . . There’s a whole heap of them kinda by-words . . . They all got a hidden meanin’, just like de Bible. Everybody can’t understand what they mean. Most people is thin-brained. They’s born wid they feet under the moon. Some folks is born wid they feet on the sun and they kin seek out de inside meanin’ of words.” —Zora Neale Hurston, qtd. in Wimbush, Magic, 1 (italics in original) Without question, books are full of Zora Neale Hurston’s “by-words”: those coded signs. And, as printed works consisting of bound-together pages, they are in fact a type of by-word within themselves. For well over four hundred years, books have represented a significant cornerstone in the development of the West. Since the invention of the Gutenberg press, words on paper have signified culture and civilization. The ability to read and write was identified with knowledge, power, and reason: books as avatars of art and science. By contrast, those nations without bookish traditions were deemed isolated and inarticulate, backward and primitive. Those who lacked literature and did not have letters of their own were considered people devoid of human ethos. In this setting, Vincent L. Wimbush’s White Men’s Magic revisits The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789), excavating in Equiano’s by-words, his coded text, a complex “spiritual story” in which the self-professed Ibo man wrote himself into being while exposing the hypocrisy of those who had once held him as a slave (9). (A recent study by Vincent Carretta has raised some doubts about whether or not Equiano was an actual native of Africa or of South Carolina; see “Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa? New Light on an Eighteenth-Century Question of Identity,” Slavery and Abolition 20 [Dec. 1999]: 96–105). The story recovered by Wimbush, Professor of Religion and Director of the Institute of Signifying Scriptures at Claremont University, is a nuanced and compelling one. Based largely on a close reading of the primary and secondary record, Wimbush’s analysis uncovers in Equiano’s life story a text full of by-words [End Page 318] in which the African author critiques the faith of his masters and denounces them as insincere. That insincerity, Wimbush explains, began long before Equiano was born, starting with the West’s exploitation of the Bible as a tool to justify a deep-seated racial bias. With the discovery of the New World, Europeans whitewashed the Scriptures as they struggled to determine to whom Christianity belonged: its Oriental forebears or its contemporary followers? In this process, the Bible became a fetish of power and Western ethnic nationalism. Within this new interpretation, all Europeans become homogenously white; all Africans were thought savage brutes (see 48–49; 59; 80–81; 107–8). Within this worldview—or, as Wimbush dubs it, “semiosphere”—reading books was mistaken as a form of a magic by Equiano and others who were unfamiliar with the Western technology; accordingly, writing represented a powerful symbol for determining one’s humanity. Identified with oral traditions, Africans and other ethnically different peoples were written out of culture—erased from the pages of the book (70–71). In this precarious environment, Olaudah Equiano learned not only how to read the book, but also how to write one of his own. In addition to writing himself into existence, to making the Western book speak back, Equiano used the Bible to frame his life story. (For a fuller account of the trope of the talking book, see Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism [1988], chap. 4, and his Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self [1987], chaps. 1–2.) In this appropriation, a literary strategy Wimbush characterizes as “scripturalization,” Equiano achieved two goals at once. First, he celebrated the presence of the African in the Western Bible, highlighting the cultural similarities between his...

Katy L. Chiles,Transformable Race: Surprising Metamorphoses in the Literature of Early America.

DRAWING on theoretical insights from Foucault and others who argue that an epistemological shift to an internal focus on the self occurs in the nineteenth century, Katy L. Chiles posits that many eighteenth-century writings show more external and transformative notions of race. She follows critics like Ezra Tawil and Roxann Wheeler in questioning the concept of race for the eighteenth century but aims to ‘defamiliarize’ (9) the term. Chiles enhances our understanding of the nuances in meanings of race that are, to quote Judith Butler, ‘performative’ (111), in discourses of natural science. Transformable Race takes its title to indicate the ways eighteenth-century authors depicted race as transformative and mutable, rather than as a biological or essentialist. Transformable Race is divided into four chapters, an introduction, and an epilogue. The introduction elaborates theories and debates in natural science, ranging from those of Carl Linneaus, Benjamin Rush, and Thomas Jefferson. Chapter 1 addresses climatological and geographic understandings of race in Samson Occam and Phillis Wheatley; Chapter 2 considers the related political bodies of Benjamin Franklin and Hendrick Aupaumut; Chapter 3 reconsiders traditional meanings of racial passing in the captivity narrative for Crevecoeur, John Marrant, and Charles Brockden Brown; and the final chapter places Olaudah Equiano’s ambiguities over natural history autobiography next to Henry Brackenridge’s ironic reversals of natural history in Modern Chivalry . The pairings of authors in the chapters manages to place the familiar associations (Occom and Wheatley) next to unfamiliar ones (Equiano and Brackenridge), which defamiliarizes common classifications of authors. The epilogue creatively touches on previous themes through an analysis of Tyler’s early Republic tale, The Algerine Captive , and the shift to internal racial identification through the language of ‘cross-racial sympathy’ (203).

Inventing George Whitefield: Race, Revivalism, and the Making of a Religious Icon by Jessica M. Parr

Reviewed by: Inventing George Whitefield: Race, Revivalism, and the Making of a Religious Icon by Jessica M. Parr William Taylor Inventing George Whitefield: Race, Revivalism, and the Making of a Religious Icon. By Jessica M. Parr. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015. Pp. [viii], 235. $60.00, ISBN 978-1-62846-198-5.) With her debut work, Inventing George Whitefield: Race, Revivalism, and the Making of a Religious Icon, Jessica M. Parr offers a compelling contribution to a well-researched field that includes Thomas S. Kidd’s notable recent study, George Whitefield: America’s Spiritual Founding Father (New Haven, 2014). It is understandable, then, that some of Parr’s broader conclusions about Whitefield as a transatlantic personality feel more well-worn than they might have otherwise. Nevertheless, Parr’s unique analytical perspective and her tight interpretative focus on Whitefield’s image allow her to make a significant contribution to the growing literature on the man and his world. Skillfully employing a variety of sources, including diaries, letters, poems, sermons, newspapers, and memorial logbooks, Parr soundly argues that George Whitefield should be seen as the key figure who unified and shaped the unwieldy Anglo-American evangelical Christianity that emerged from the Great Awakening and extended into at least the nineteenth century. Central to her argument is the unique use of the concept of a religious icon as an analytical tool. To this end, Parr relies heavily on the definition of an icon expressed by the early Christian theologian St. John of Damascus. This iconic perspective reveals that “[i]t is no accident that evangelical Christianity took off in the British Atlantic around 1739, just as Whitefield’s missionary career took off. Whitefield embodied a religious culture that he helped to shape and promote” (p. 7). The process of making or “inventing” Whitefield into “a model by which a diverse group of observers could find spiritual fulfillment in an emerging, diverse, and nebulous religious culture” was not uncontested, and there were multiple contributors (p. 7). Whitefield himself used print as his preferred medium to carefully construct his transatlantic image as a reforming Anglican revivalist who emphasized the New Birth and religious toleration and who could be readily accepted by Protestants from every denomination. But he was not alone. Both during and after his life there were others who worked to shape Whitefield as an icon, such as John and Charles Wesley, Selina the Countess of Huntingdon, Phillis Wheatley, Nathaniel Whitaker, Anthony Benezet, Olaudah Equiano, and John Marrant. They co-opted his memory for their own varied purposes, which ranged from pro- and antirevivalism, to pro- and antislavery efforts, to support for the American Revolution. Throughout, Parr clearly and persuasively makes her case, and she succeeds in this effort by focusing closely on her main interpretative claim. This limited scope is seen, among other places, in the narrow endnotes and the lack of tangential historiographical digressions. The result is a book that is refreshingly straightforward and accessible. Unfortunately, the book’s few difficulties also stem from this approach. For instance, Parr primarily focuses on Whitefield and his image during the 1730s, the 1740s, and the period after his death [End Page 658] in 1770. The wealth of evidence available for these years helps explain this emphasis, but the strategy leaves the 1750s and 1760s largely overlooked. Another curious oversight can be found in the treatment of Whitefield’s wife, Elizabeth. She is never mentioned by name, and when she is briefly addressed it is on the occasion of her death. While the book’s single-minded and carefully limited focus is generally a benefit, these few instances reveal a need to read Inventing George Whitefield alongside a more thorough account of Whitefield’s life. In the end, though, this should not seriously detract from Parr’s convincing argument regarding the significance of George Whitefield’s iconic image in shaping Anglo-American evangelical Christianity from the First Great Awakening through the Second Great Awakening and beyond. William Taylor Alabama State University Copyright © 2016 The Southern Historical Association

Giant’s Causeway: Frederick Douglass’s Irish Odyssey and the Making of an American Visionary by Tom Chaffin

Reviewed by: Giant’s Causeway: Frederick Douglass’s Irish Odyssey and the Making of an American Visionary by Tom Chaffin Patricia J. Ferreira (bio) Giant’s Causeway: Frederick Douglass’s Irish Odyssey and the Making of an American Visionary. By Tom Chaffin. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014. Pp. 292. Cloth, $29.95.) Ireland, especially in the last ten years, has embraced the fact that Frederick Douglass toured the country for four months beginning in late 1845, on an antislavery lecture circuit that would also take him to Scotland and England. Although Olaudah Equiano, on behalf of the British campaign to end slavery, and Charles Lenox Remond, another American abolitionist, also traveled to Ireland, respectively in 1791 and 1840, only Douglass’s journey has garnered significant contemporary attention. Plaques in Cork and Waterford commemorate his visit to both cities, a dramatic nine-foot statue by the sculptor Andrew Edwards awaits permanent installation in Dublin, a full-length documentary titled Frederick Douglass and the White Negro explores the visit as well as African American–Irish relations and is regularly aired on national television, and state universities as well as Trinity College have hosted forums on the former slave turned international statesman. Tom Chaffin’s contribution in Giant’s Causeway: Frederick Douglass’s Irish Odyssey and the Making of an American Visionary is the extensive, documented backdrop he provides to every step of Douglass’s Irish sojourn. Through Chaffin’s deft storytelling the reader learns not only that his subject sailed aboard the paddle steamer Cambria to Ireland, but also what transpired when fellow passengers, especially those from slaveholding states, learned that the former slave was among them. Once Douglass reaches Ireland, the reader is treated to such scenes as his meeting with Daniel O’Connell, the revered freedom fighter who advanced the repeal movement, advocating an end to the Act of Union between Ireland and England. Chaffin re-creates the circumstances so vividly that we feel as if we are witnessing close up the pair exchanging handshakes and pleasantries before discussing the conflicts that individually brought them to the fore of nineteenth-century social reform and made for their mutual admiration. Given the acrimonious relations between African Americans and the newly emigrated Irish, Chaffin also conscientiously treats Douglass’s initial [End Page 273] reticence to travel to Ireland as well as the tension between his mission and the reality of what he saw there. For instance, Douglass became conflicted by the singularity of his mission—to garner Irish support and involvement in ending the slave trade—when all around him he saw the ravages of the impending Great Famine. He also battled the bigoted responses of clergy, from a range of denominations, after he implicated them for their toleration of slavery. Given the sectarian divisions of Ireland, such incriminations were potent well beyond their perceived religious heresy. As Chaffin skillfully renders the details of Douglass’s Irish sojourn, he does not stray from the delicate circumstances that his subject was forced to negotiate. As a result, Chaffin’s text moves well beyond a simple chronological accounting. With all of the particulars, however, there are instances where the text digresses needlessly. Since the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass remains one of the preeminent accounts of an individual’s move from slavery to freedom, there is no need for Chaffin to give a synopsis of the autobiography. Douglass’s writing of his own story is far more powerful and politically important than secondary summarizing. It also intrudes too much on the original ground Chaffin is staking with his focus on Douglass in Ireland. Additionally, the way Chaffin contends with the Dublin editions of the Narrative—continuously stressing that they were “‘British Isles’” versions—ignores the recognized scholarship on the political implications of their Irish context. Surely it is crucial that the first place the Narrative was published outside of the United States was Ireland? Rather than giving air to such significance, however, Chaffin focuses on the well-worn causes and impact of the famine as well as British Prime Minister Robert Peel’s anxiety over the spread of potato blight. Again, not only is such attention unnecessary, it seems excessive and...

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. …

Bauhaus Already Lives Here and Why the World Still Doesn't Know It

Letters & Opinions Mary Serumaga (bio) and Namata Serumaga-Musisi (bio) A Call for Reparations for Slavery and Colonisation by Mary Serumaga Any hopes the Caribbean community may have entertained of Britain acknowledging culpability for slavery were dispelled by Prime Minister David Cameron’s September 2015 address to the Jamaican Parliament during a recent trade visit. Cameron summarily ruled out Britain’s accepting responsibility to make reparations; it was possible, he said, for Jamaica to move on. The issue of reparations is often clouded by the argument that the individual perpetrators of the crime of slavery are long gone and that their descendants are entitled to their inherited wealth. Though Cameron proposed that Britain’s role in ending slavery exonerates his country from the responsibility of making reparations, the fact is that true credit belongs to ex-slaves like Olaudah Equiano, who bought himself out of slavery for £40, or the American Frederick Douglass, who escaped. Both wrote best-selling autobiographies describing the wretchedness of life as a slave and campaigned in England and Ireland for abolition until a critical mass of abolitionists was attained. Olaudah’s letters to British Members of Parliament—Lord Hawkesbury and William Pitt—survive him. Cameron’s blindness to these realities is similar to the denials made by many beneficiaries of the Nakba, apartheid, and the Holocaust: nothing to do with them. Britain was the legal administrator of Jamaica and other slave colonies whose very existence and prosperity depended on slavery. Any actions taken by the British government in relation to her slave and other colonies is the responsibility of the State. It is disingenuous to argue otherwise. The British East Africa Company, for example, ‘acquired’ East Africa and later sold the territory to the British government, a transaction which ended in an orgy of violent repression for which Britain has accepted responsibility. Foreign Secretary William Hague said after the settlement was reached in 2013: The British government recognises that Kenyans were subjected to torture and other forms of ill-treatment at the hands of the colonial administration. … The British government sincerely regrets that these abuses took place and that they marred Kenya’s progress to independence. Torture and [End Page 1] ill-treatment are abhorrent violations of human dignity which we unreservedly condemn. The futility of denial on the basis of the time elapsed between Abolition and the present day is illustrated by the current situation of surviving victims of the 1948 Nakba. Many are able to point out their former homes now occupied by Israelis, and some still wear their keys around their necks. So, are we to say the current occupants and/or their heirs owe nothing to these refugees? Is this on the basis they did not personally drive out the Palestinians and may even have opposed Zionism? And have subsequently been hard-working taxpayers? The fact is that it is only because the events of 1948 were condoned that the illegal settlement movement can go ahead. With the passage of time, human and physical evidence will be diminished and the events of 1948 will pass into folklore and, like the descendants of slaves, heirs of the Nakba survivors will be advised to move on. A relevant precedent for reparations for slavery and colonialism is the compensation of Nazi Holocaust victims. Many categories of claims by Holocaust victims were rightly designated as being claimable by either the direct survivor victims or their heirs. These include the loss of parents and/or siblings; actual properties of which the victims were dispossessed (money, other valuables and household goods); and having been subjected to slave labor, denied entry to some countries (where refuge could have been sought, known as refoulement in international law), and expulsion from other countries. Any attempt to shield taxpayers of States with unresolved criminal issues by saying they are not individually responsible for slavery and colonialism collapses completely when it is noted that Holocaust survivors and their heirs were not compensated by individual perpetrators, nor by groups of Nazi tax-payers (most of whom were still alive when the claims began to be made), but by sovereign States that carried out or facilitated the atrocities; Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium...

Rethinking the Black Atlantic: Gallows Literature, Slave Narratives, and Visual Culture

Rethinking the Black AtlanticGallows Literature, Slave Narratives, and Visual Culture Rochelle Raineri Zuck (bio) In the Shadow of the Gallows: Race, Crime, and American Civic Identity Jeannine Marie DeLombard Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012 446pp. Journeys of the Slave Narrative in the Early Americas Edited by Nicole N. Aljoe and Ian Finseth Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014 239pp. Picture Freedom: Remaking Black Visuality in the Early Nineteenth Century Jasmine Nichole Cobb New York: New York University Press, 2015 264pp. While it has been twenty-three years since Paul Gilroy published The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), it remains a touch-stone in studies of the African diaspora. Three recent works, Jeannine Marie DeLombard’s In the Shadow of the Gallows, Nicole N. Aljoe and Ian Finseth’s edited collection Journeys of the Slave Narrative, and Jasmine Nichole Cobb’s Picture Freedom, all engage with Gilroy’s work and offer fresh perspectives on textual productions by and about people of African descent in the Atlantic world, particularly as they speak to issues of race, subjectivity, and political and social belonging. DeLombard highlights the ways in which Gilroy’s concept of the “Black Atlantic” led to the formation of the canon of early Afro-diasporic literatures that we know today, including such figures as Olaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatley, Venture Smith, [End Page 683] and many others.1 This vein of scholarship, she argues, has “entrenched the Afro-diasporic canon’s foundations ever more deeply in masculinist life-writing, [but] it has ignored arguably the most widely circulated, influential form of early black personal narrative, the criminal confession” (12–13). It is this gap that DeLombard addresses in her fascinating study of “gallows literature” and the criminal confession. Aljoe’s introduction opens with a discussion of Gilroy’s concept of the slave ship as a “chronotope” and Marcus Rediker’s analysis of the actual ships that participated in the slave trade, many of which were refurbished vessels that had originally pursued other enterprises. Journeys of the Slave Narrative, which features essays on works from North America, South and Latin America, and the Caribbean, is informed by Gilroy’s conception of the Black Atlantic and by Rediker’s characterization of the slave ship (which functions as a counterpoint to Gilroy’s chronotope). In advancing the volume’s argument for a more capacious definition of the “slave narrative,” Aljoe offers a compelling reading of Rediker’s vision of the slave ship—a blend of different materials and purposes from around the Creole Atlantic—as a metaphor for the early narratives on which the collections’ authors focus. Cobb also draws on Gilroy’s discussion of the slave ship, describing the “transatlantic parlor” as another “single, complex unit of analysis” of the African experience in the Atlantic world (Gilroy qtd. in Cobb 17). Gilroy’s ship provides both a critical model and a point of contrast for Cobb’s own exploration of the ways in which black freedom was “domesticated” through the use of visual images. Informed by Gilroy’s concept of the Black Atlantic and the expanded literary canon that his work made possible, DeLombard, Aljoe and Finseth, and Cobb offer fresh perspectives on early African American literature and culture and pressure familiar understandings of genre and temporality. At a basic level, these three works share a concern with representations of the freedom and unfreedom of people of African descent and devote significant attention to African Americans. The work of DeLombard, Cobb, and the authors featured in Aljoe and Finseth’s collection of essays testifies to the range of critical approaches that can be brought to bear on African diasporic literatures and early American studies, including law and literature, critical race theory, Marxism, feminism, transnationalism and hemispheric studies, food studies, intellectual history, visual theory, and so forth. They also complicate and extend what we understand as African American literature—moving beyond first-person narratives of the journey [End Page 684] from slavery to freedom to include texts such as criminal confessions, ship’s logs, and lithographs. In so doing, these three works also turn away from the search for an “authentic” black voice—with DeLombard noting the distinction between “writers of...

Teaching Olaudah Equiano’s Narrative: Pedagogical Strategies and New Perspectives Edited by Eric D. Lamore

Teaching Olaudah Equiano’s Narrative: Pedagogical Strategies and New Perspectives Edited by Eric D. Lamore

Captain Paul Cuffe (1759–1817): Nineteenth-century African American Seafarer and Entrepreneur

Captain Paul Cuffe was one of many African American, Caribbean and African persons who were involved in anti-slavery and racial justice struggles across the nineteenth century “Black Atlantic”. He was a highly skilled mariner, wealthy entrepreneur and advocate for the enslaved, yet his name has almost been forgotten, unlike Frederick Douglass and Olaudah Equiano. This article tells Cuffe's life story and ponders the reasons why so many people like Cuffe disappeared from mainstream history. The article proceeds to reflect on the theological and social significance of Cuffe's life for today's struggles for liberation and radical Christian commitment.

Biography and the Black Atlantic. Edited by Lisa A. Lindsay and John Wood Sweet (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). 370 pp. $55.00

This exceptional set of essays explores the “Black Atlantic” through biography. The volume is organized around particular life stories that illustrate the implications for interpreting the interconnected histories of Atlantic societies. Generally, these fine contributions raise issues of how to reconstruct biographies to determine their significance as individualized glimpses into patterns of history; responses to enslavement; and the quest for liberty, dignity, and meaning. Implicitly, biography is interdisciplinary because it draws on written and sometimes oral texts that have to be examined through the lens of literary criticism while explaining the context in terms of historical methodology. This volume addresses this dual orientation carefully and thoroughly. Suitably critiqued, it can help to propel the genre even further as a historical tool of analysis. The book is divided into twelve chapters and an afterword. A number of contributions summarize or extend earlier studies of individuals.One of the great achievements in this volume is the focus on the biographies of women, who are seldom seen or heard in the history of slavery, particularly those women who were enslaved in Africa. Jon Sensbach discusses the lives of Rebecca Rotten and Maria, the “Mooress,” both of whom were Moravians. Cassandra Pybus looks at Jane Thompson, who escaped to British forces in Virginia and ultimately found her way to Sierra Leone in 1791. Rebecca Scott and Jean-Michel Hébrard follow the path of Rosalie of the “Poulard Nation,” identified as Fulbe, during the era of the Haitian Revolution.Martin A. Klein provides a marvelous overview of African biographical studies, as well as an introduction to the problem of finding the voices of the enslaved; he gives particular attention to scholarship about slaves born in Africa that has often been overlooked. Sheryl Kroen uncovers the ideological underpinnings of Atlantic history through the British animated character “Robinson Charley,” who personified the “North Atlantic” community during World War II and the subsequent Cold War. João José Reis reconstructs the story of Manoel Joaquim Ricardo, who left Hausaland in 1806/7 and, after gaining his freedom in Brazil, became a wealthy merchant and slaveholder who traded in West Africa. Lloyd S. Kramer follows the path of David Dorr who traveled from North America to Europe during the 1850s. Similarly, Roquinaldo Ferreira studies Francisco Gomes, a merchant and colonial official in the Angolan seaport of Benguela, who in the early 1820s was accused of plotting a rebellion to free the colony from Portuguese rule. Gomes was born in Rio de Janeiro, possibly as a slave; in 1800, he was exiled to Benguela as a criminal.Inevitably, a few caveats are warranted in measuring the success of this volume. Vincent Carretta repeats his well-known arguments about the methodological issues concerning the reconstruction of the life of Gustavus Vassa, whom he prefers to call Olaudah Equiano without exploring whether the individual in question was known, or preferred to be known, by that name at the time. Unfortunately, his methodology does not take into account either recent research of others or previous criticisms of his own work. Lisa Lindsay examines the mythology of “tribal marks” in her investigation of James C. Vaughan’s Yoruba background without raising questions about the meaning of facial and body scarification and the inappropriate use of the term tribal in discussing its significance. Nor does Lindsay question the application of the ethnic name Yoruba in the context of Egba history and its relationship to the collapse of Oyo.Jane Landers applies ethnic terminology from the Americas, specifically Mandinga, to ethnicity in West Africa, where the term was not used, without fully comprehending the antiquity and centrality of Islam in the Senegambia region of West Africa. She does not explain who the “Muslim converts” were in the Gambia; in the early eighteenth century, Muslim identity in Senegambia had more to do with the emerging age of jihad than with matters involving conversion to Islam per se.Reis is incorrect in claiming that kola was made into a drink when it was chewed. He also overlooks the practice of murgu in West Africa in the “hiring out” of slaves in Bahia. His subject of study was not “probably” enslaved during jihad; no other explanation is even plausible. Like Landers and Scott/Hébrard, he fails to place jihad in its proper context. Hence, on the one hand, these explorations in life histories reveal interconnections within the trans-Atlantic world, but, on the other, they sometimes betray weaknesses in comprehending the historiography of Africa during the period of Atlantic slavery.

A Silent Book, Some Kisses, and John Marrant's <em>Narrative</em>

The book-often a Bible or prayer book-never speaks. Despite its silence, scholars call it a strangely insistent metaphor, a curious image and the first repeated and revised trope of tradition, first trope to be Signified upon.1 Found in several early African American narratives, talking book generally describes a scene in which an individual (traditionally, an African slave) spies his master reading a book.2 The sight produces a desire to hear text speak, but upon touching book-either in form of placing one's ear or lips to text-it remains silent.3 In his 1774 Narrative, James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw offers this account:And when first I saw [my master] read, I never so surprised in my whole life when I saw book talk to my master; for I thought it did, I observed him to look upon it, and move his lips. I wished it would do so to me. . . . I follow'd him to place where he put book, being mightily delighted with it, and when nobody saw me, I open'd it and put my ear down close upon it, in great hope that it would say something to me but very sorry and greatly disappointed when I found it would not speak.4According to Henry Louis Gates Jr., Gronniosaw remembers a failed conversation between an eager listener and a prayer book that refuses to speak. This refusal denies very possibility of literacy, the ultimate parameter by which to measure humanity of authors struggling to define an African self in Western letters.5 This silence ensures that Gronniosaw has no access to any proper measure of humanity. Yet, silence begets a response-namely, a call for revision to which John Marrant, Olaudah Equiano, John Jea, and Quobna Ottobah Cugoano respond.6Gates's reading of this curious sight privileges a desire-imagined a longing that seeks satisfaction-for literacy. When book does not talk, this unsatisfied desire mobilizes revisionism that marks, according to Gates, beginning of an African American literary tradition. Moreover, Gronniosaw, a first, collectivizes a way of being-that is, possessing an inability to hear book his master does-which is mediated through a feeling of suffering; he writes of his displeasure, I was very sorry and greatly disappointed when I found [the book] would not speak.7 In Gates's reading, when John Marrant, Olaudah Equiano, and John Jea revise Gronniosaw's words, they reproduce this suffering and in so doing participate in a collective experience of embodied and ontological suffering or race-making of African American literature. Thus, result mobilizes an idea of race as a stable and transhistorical category of that is lived an experiential and collective way of being mediated through a collective feeling of great suffering.8 Herein lies origins of this written tradition.Gates's reading of talking book adequately memorializes a presumed misunderstanding of sight and act of reading but is too simplistic. Maybe Gronniosaw suffers when book does not speak, but I question whether his suffering births a cohesive racial identity, literary category, or even if this scene marks a desire for actual book learning.9 Moreover, his narrative seemingly sidesteps scholarly need to (im) properly racialize him in order to note profundity of his religious experiences. It is at this point in classroom discussions that students begin to ask, If it's not about race, then what? But answer-Christian faith-is quite clear to these early writers, such Gronniosaw, Marrant, and Phillis Wheatley. Because race does not function a stable or transhistorical category of identity in early African American literature (though this fact should not deny an emergent racial collectivity), faith makes real their stories and their self-making.I argue for a revision of Gates's reading by way of an examination of minister Marrant's deployment of trope of talking book in his 1785 Narrative. …

Print, Writing, and the Difference Media Make: Revisiting The Signifying Monkey after Book History

Print, Writing, and the Difference Media MakeRevisiting The Signifying Monkey after Book History Joseph Rezek (bio) Consider two familiar frontispieces. Phillis Wheatley at the table, chin in one hand, quill in the other, eyes turned away from us, fixed in a contemplative upward gaze (fig. 1). She is at work on a manuscript—piously, perhaps, or inspired by more secular muses—and an inkwell and closed book lay ready to hand. Clothed in the attire of a “Negro Servant,” as the surrounding border puts it, how different she looks from Olaudah Equiano, in ruffles and a great coat. “We see an African dressed as an English gentleman,” Vincent Carretta has observed of Equiano’s frontispiece, and one who defiantly stares at the reader (Equiano 280). Equiano holds an open Bible, and as he thrusts the printed book forward he invites us to consider its lessons as precedent and echo of his own (fig. 2). Contrasts between the two images are evident along the axes of gender, class, and social status; Wheatley demurs and remains enslaved, while Equiano, daring his readers, is nominally free. But one difference stood out for me after rereading Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism (1988)—ironically, in fact, because this influential book provides few conceptual tools for us to notice or understand it. Wheatley’s frontispiece dramatizes a scene of writing (quill, manuscript, inkwell), while Equiano’s signals the power of print—because traces of the press are part of its spectacle. In The Signifying Monkey, Gates explores rhetorical figures that turn on the tension between the spoken and the written word, a tension he places at the center of black vernacular discourse and the centuries-old literary tradition it inspired. And yet despite his sustained emphasis on the mediating nature of language, Gates conflates the medium of handwriting with the medium of print—the technology [End Page 891] of marking words with a pen on paper (once per iteration) and the technology of fixing impressions on paper with moveable type (over and over again). Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Frontispiece to Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (London, 1773), by Phillis Wheatley. The Library Company of Philadelphia. On the surface this difference seems trivial, especially for a literary study so deeply inspired by oral modes of verbal expression and linguistic play. The difference matters enormously, however, for the group of texts assembled in the chapter of The Signifying Monkey that has been most influential for those working in the early period, “The Trope of the Talking Book.” In what follows, I consider the implications of that chapter’s elision of the difference media make. I write as a scholar participating in a widespread effort to reinterpret African American literature from the perspective of media specificity, one grounded in a long tradition of editorial scholarship and animated recently through a number of conferences, symposia, and collaborative publications.1 My interest in the difference between [End Page 892] writing and print, encapsulated for the moment in the Wheatley and Equiano images, has been inspired by the fundamental questions this scholarly community has been asking about the early black archive—old questions, no doubt, about “black messages” and “white envelopes” (Sekora), and what Robert Stepto called the “medley of voices” in published slave narratives (10)—but with new answers invested less in racial authenticity than in the puzzling complexities of print culture. Revisiting The Signifying Monkey in this way admittedly leaves aside a number of interesting topics we might consider upon the publication of the book’s twenty-fifth-anniversary edition—namely, its role in helping to legitimize the study of African American literature, its controversial deployment of deconstruction in order to do so, and the scholarly allusions and disagreements Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Frontispiece to The Interesting Narrative (London, 1789), by Olaudah Equiano. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. [End Page 893] Gates’s early writings have inspired since the mid-1980s. Instead of asking how much The Signifying Monkey has meant to scholars in the past, this essay asks the perhaps more...

Writing Africa in Belgium, Europe: A Conversation with Chika Unigwe

Winner of Africa’s largest literary prize, the Nigeria Prize for Literature, for On Black Sisters’ Street (2009) and author of three other novels and various short stories in anthologies and journals, including Wasafiri and Moving Worlds , Chika Unigwe has been hailed as a “third-generation” Nigerian writer alongside other notable young writers such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Chris Abani. In this interview, conducted right before her relocation to the United States, Unigwe reflects on what Africa means to her as a Nigerian author who has lived in Belgium for almost two decades and how her move to Europe influenced her as a person and especially as a writer. Touching on issues such as labeling, home, language, and colonization, she openly speaks of her frustrations with racism in Belgium, her therapeutic motivations for writing, and what it has meant to her to win the Nigeria Prize for Literature. At the end of the interview she also briefly comments on her latest novel about Olaudah Equiano, the famous African ex-slave whose self-published 1789 autobiography supported the British anti-slavery movement.

To Make a Literature Black

To Make a Literature Black Kenneth W. Warren (bio) A helpful point of departure for considering the significance of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s, The Signifying Monkey twenty-five years after its publication may be Gates’s own assertion that “the most prevalent manifestation of signifying over the last four decades is to be found in the corpus of hip-hop music. You might say hip-hop is signifying on steroids” (xxix). That hip-hop has become a worldwide musical phenomenon is beyond dispute. That Gates’s testimony (which he mentions proudly in the new introduction) in the 1990 trial in which the rap group 2 Live Crew was acquitted on charges of obscenity for its sexually explicit lyrics played any significant role in rap’s commercial success is perhaps plausible if somewhat harder to credit. Yet for Gates the concomitant rise of rap and hip-hop and his own career may constitute the most notable legacy of his work. Of course, Gates’s view on this point does not necessarily entail that we also conclude that The Signifying Monkey has been inconsequential for the study of early American literature (and one could, on this point, total up citations to that work in journals and monographs on the period). Yet whatever picture we might paint statistically or otherwise of the book’s influence on the scholarship of the period, it is clear that in thinking about his book Gates remains enamored of the idea that each historical moment of expression by African-descended peoples constitutes a “part of the never-ending intertextual conversation that’s been going on in the black tradition at least since Esu-Elegbara came to embody indeterminacy in the African tradition” (xxxii). The point is that when we read texts by black writers we hear the present in the past and the past in the present. As Gates elaborates: Texts written over two centuries ago address what we might think of as common subjects of condition that continue to be strangely resonant, and relevant, as we approach the twenty-first century. Just as there are remarkably few literary traditions whose first century’s existence is determined by texts created by slaves, so too are there few traditions that [End Page 843] claim such an apparent unity from a fundamental political condition represented for over two hundred years in such strikingly similar patterns and details. (140) Yet against Gates’s attempt to pull the study of early American literature into the currents of an ongoing black tradition there arose during this same period notions of the Atlantic world and the Black Atlantic more committed to historical periodization and discontinuity than to the telos of nationhood or peoplehood. If for Gates, under the sway of the signifying monkey as a trope, the experience of engaging with black writers in the eighteenth century and hip-hop performances in the early twentieth is finding the familiar in the distant and making aural and sonic connections across time and space, for other historically minded scholars, as I wrote some years ago in a reflective piece on the notion of the black Atlantic (“Taking the Measure”), the goal has been to bring into view a world peopled with black men and women whose horizons of expectation and being—and whose notions of literariness—diverge significantly from our own. Initially for historians of the period, and increasingly for early Americanist literary scholars, the Atlantic world was seen as indicating a spatial-temporal moment rather than a transhistorical sensibility. Of course, one cannot invoke the term Black Atlantic without bringing into the discussion Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), which was published four years after The Signifying Monkey and announced as, among other things, an attempt to decenter the United States from the study of black culture and intellectual history. For Gilroy, the transatlantic life itineraries of black writers from Olaudah Equiano and Phillis Wheatley forward to the twentieth century, which included transatlantic crossings between the Americas, Europe, and Africa, attested to the extranational character of black expression beginning with the Enlightenment. And it was this international aspect of black literary production that Gilroy believed US-centered scholarship had...

Eric B. Song Dominion Undeserved: Milton and the Perils of CreationDominion Undeserved: Milton and the Perils of Creation. Eric B. Song. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013. Pp. vii+215.

<i>Eric B. Song</i> Dominion Undeserved: Milton and the Perils of Creation<i>Dominion Undeserved: Milton and the Perils of Creation</i>. Eric B. Song. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013. Pp. vii+215.

Transformable race: surprising metamorphoses in the literature of early America

Table of Contents Introduction: Surprising Metamorphoses 1. Becoming Colored in Occom and Wheatley's Early America Make Samson Occom So To Make a Poet Black 2. The Political Bodies of Benjamin Franklin and Hendrick Aupaumut You Are What You Eat or, Franklin's Practice Makes (Almost) Perfect Hendrick Aupaumut's Own Color 3. Transforming into Natives: Crevecoeur, Marrant, and Brown on Becoming Indian Passing As, Transforming into Crevecoeur's American Race John Marrant Becoming Cherokee Edgar Huntly's Unsettling Transformation 4. Doubting Transformable Race: Equiano, Brackenridge, and the Textuality of Natural History Quote and to Question: Olaudah Equiano's Provocative Ends Brackenridge and the Limits of Writing Natural History Epilogue: Interiorizing Racial Metamorphosis: The Algerine Captive's Language of Sympathy NOTES

The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within US Slave Culture by Vincent Woodard (review)

Reviewed by: The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within US Slave Culture by Vincent Woodard Christopher Lloyd THE DELECTABLE NEGRO: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within US Slave Culture. By Vincent Woodard. New York: New York University Press. 2014. The Delectable Negro explores American slave culture, revealing the fantasies, investments, and discourses that figure the black slave as consumable and desirable—both charged with homoeroticism. For Vincent Woodard, notions of cannibalism and consumption within slave culture have been overlooked by scholars, so this radical and incisive book disrupts our conventional readings of slavery as well as key literary and political texts. It should be noted here that Woodard died before this book was published; it is a shame that he could not see his daring work enter debate. Praise must go to Joyce and McBride, moreover, for their careful and attentive editorial work that made the publication of this text possible. Woodard’s study attends to the moment when “black masculinity, racial identity, homoeroticism, and a distinctive American appetite for black male flesh and soul congealed” (24). In chapter one, Woodard looks to the intersection and “correlation between the consumptive appetites of whites and the transatlantic slave trade” (30), reading various cultural co-ordinates together, including Olaudah Equiano’s famous slave narrative. The next chapter describes the relation between slave degradation (often sexualized) and the master’s sense of honour, which is catalysed through modes of consumption. In chapter three, Woodard attends to Frederick Douglass’s [End Page 146] writings for he described slavery “more than anyone else has, as a cannibalistic institution” (95). The next chapter reads Harriet Jacobs’s slave narrative through the gendered elements of consumptive desires. Taking the character of Luke as central to this argument, Woodard ultimately suggests that scholars of slavery need “to get beyond our theoretical aversions to gender and sex variance” (170) in this world and its literature. Chapter five circles around the figure of Nat Turner: the literal, literary, and metaphorical consumption of his body. Through a reading of William Styron’s novel about Turner, the critiques of that book by black intellectuals, as well as James Baldwin’s defence of it, Woodard mounts an argument about the way Turner’s body is continually consumed. While the chapter is otherwise engaging and light-footed, Woodard problematically eschews an explicit critique of the homophobic and sexist opinions that saturate the attacks on Styron and his novel; I find this silence strange and counter to the larger concerns of this project. The final chapter optimistically locates “black self-fashioning and cultural formation within the eroticized male interior” (211). In excavating the black male interior—particularly through the site and figure of the anus—Woodard claims we can garner a better understanding of slavery’s complex relation to the hunger of (and for) black men. While Woodard’s male focus throughout the book is not a problem in itself, I wonder if this final chapter could have gestured more openly to the interiority of both male and female black bodies; for surely it is across genders and sexes that we will most richly understand the corporeal vicissitudes of slavery. Woodard’s book might be coordinated with contemporary scholarship such as Russ Castronovo’s Necro Citizenship (2001), which looks to social death and slavery in nineteenth-century American culture or Michael Bibler’s Cotton’s Queer Relations (2009) which reads literary texts that restructure the plantation as a queer space. Both texts can illuminate further Woodard’s interest in black bodies, male interiors, homoeroticism, and consumptive desires. Reading The Delectable Negro in relation to these works alone reveals the highly nuanced and exciting directions that critical works on slavery are moving. Woodard’s career would surely have been even bolder after this book, but this text’s interruption into critical theory alone is itself worth celebrating. Christopher Lloyd University of East Anglia, United Kingdom Copyright © 2014 Mid-America American Studies Association

Equiano’s Trifles

This article asks what we might learn by attending to the form of Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative . Henry Louis Gates, Jr. first took seriously the structure and tropes of Equiano’s work, but Vincent Carretta’s famous questions about Equiano's birthplace have eclipsed other lines of inquiry. Suggesting that there is much we have missed in the Interesting Narrative in this turn away from form, I argue that a counterplot runs through the text, one shaped through textual clusters I refer to (using Equiano’s keyword) as “trifles.” In this counterplot Equiano expresses thoughts and emotions not containable within contemporary abolitionist discourse.

Collective Commerce and the Problem of Autobiography in Olaudah Equiano’s Narrative

This essay examines Olaudah Equiano’s use of novelistic types in light of his vision for collective commerce between Britain and Africa. Both in Equiano’s own day and in our own, criticism of his Narrative (1789) has emphasized his transition from the general to the particular, from the slave to the subject. Engaging the longstanding autobiographical reading, this essay identifies instead Equiano’s interests in types of and groups of people. In doing so, it finds the transformation from a pre-commercial type of African to a commercial one that occurs in the text to reflect Equiano’s economic worldview. As it draws on what one scholar terms the “speculative discourse” of eighteenth-century finance, a discourse that was linked with the early realist novel, the Narrative helps us to apprehend how Equiano hoped to change the terms of global commerce.

Black American Literature and the Problem of Racism, Slavery and Oppression in the Post Slavery Era: A Reappraisal of Dunbar’s &lt;i&gt;The Sport of the Gods&lt;/i&gt;

The problem created by racism could be traced to be the major factor behind most Black literature through the ages. In America, this gave rise to a new form of literary expression known as the Black American Literature or African American Literature. The main concern of this sub-genre of literature is to redeem the face of the black man and his culture from the negative to a more positive direction. This study reappraises the development of Black American Literature from the 18th century writers, like Phyllis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano, to Post slavery era writers, especially of an author like Paul Lawrence Dunbar. Focusing on Dunbar’s The Sport of the Gods, the paper exposes a sad situation where the blacks were made the spectacle (sport) of the whites (gods). Berry Hamilton (a Black American) is used in this novel to share the life story and experiences of other blacks with the readers especially about their encounters with their Slave Masters.