Abstract
None of his predecessors asserts his or her identity as a Briton more fully than Equiano. … he adopts the cultural, political, religious, and social values that enable him to be accepted as British. Yet he always retains his perspective as an African who has been deracinated and thus has the advantage of knowing his adopted British culture from both the inside and the outside, a perspective that W. E. B. Du Bois calls the double consciousness of the Black person in a predominantly White society.1
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Notes
Vincent Carretta, ‘Introduction’, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, ed. Carretta (New York: Penguin, 1995), p. xvii. Subsequent references to The Interesting Narrative are from this edition.
J. M. Coetzee, ‘Introduction’, Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. v.
See Peter Hulme, ‘Introduction: The Cannibal Scene’, Cannibalism and the Colonial World, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 1–38.
William Arens, The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology & Anthropophagy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).
See C. L. Innes, A History of Black and Asian Writing in Britain, 1700–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 17–19.
Henry Louis Gates Jr, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory ofA fro-American Literary Criticism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 153; Carretta, ‘Introduction’, p. xvii.
Alan Rice, “‘Who’s Eating Whom”: The Discourse of Cannibalism in the Literature of the Black Atlantic from Equiano’s Travels to Toni Morrison’s Beloved’, Research in A frican Literatures, 29, 4 (1998), 107–21 (p. 113).
Vincent Carretta, ‘Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa? New Light on an Eighteenth-Century Question of Identity’, Slavery and Abolition 20, 3(1999), 96–105.
We can compare Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal (1729), which pursues the consequences of the trade in bodies on British attitudes toward her colonies. Here Swift interprets the British relationship with Ireland as one of bodily consumption. See Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 83, and Charlotte Sussman, Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender, and British Slavery, 1713–1833 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 49–80.
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 4.
Such an imbricated identity, drawing upon a range of influences, can be accounted for in the context of Paul Gilroy’s study The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993), an analysis of such engagements between the African diaspora and the West. The Black Atlantic is a model which enables a historicized notion of blackness, one that draws upon various influences, as opposed to an essentialist conception that can be traced back only to the African continent. Gilroy has been criticized by Laura Chrisman in her recent study Postcolonial Contraventions (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). For a comment on the confluence of Britain and the figure of the slave ship see my ‘Undoing Empire: Work and Leisure in the Gallery of Trade and Empire’, Journal for the Study ofBritish Culture, 7, 2 (2000), 153–67.
Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1984), p. 203.
S. I. Martin, Incomparable World (London: Quartet, 1996).
Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
Kevin L. Cope, ‘Al1 Aboard the Ark of Possibility; or, Robinson Crusoe Returns from Mars as a Small-Footprint, Multi-Channel Indeterminacy Machine’, Studies in the Novel, 30 (1998), 150–63 (p. 151).
Peter Hulme, ‘Robinson Crusoe and Friday’, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 175–222 (p. 194).
Henri Grégoire, An Enquiry Concerning the Intellectual and Moral Faculties, and Literature of Negroes, trans. David Bailie Warden, ed. and intro. Graham Russell Hodges (Armonk and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1997), p. 97. See also S. E. Ogude, ‘Olaudah Equiano and the Tradition of Defoe’, African Literatures Today, 14 (1984), 77–92, and Bill Overton, ‘Countering Crusoe Two Colonial Narratives’, Critical Survey, 4, 3(1992), 302–10.
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself ed. Werner Sollors (New York: Norton Critical Editions, 2001); The African: Olaudah Equiano (London: X-Press, 1998).
Caryl Phillips, Cambridge (London: Bloomsbury, 1991); Fred D’Aguiar, Feeding the Ghosts (London: Chatto and Windus, 1997); David Dabydeen, A Harlot’s Progress (London: Jonathan Cape, 1999); S. I. Martin, Incomparable World.
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Stein, M. (2004). Who’s Afraid of Cannibals? Some Uses of the Cannibalism Trope in Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative . In: Carey, B., Ellis, M., Salih, S. (eds) Discourses of Slavery and Abolition. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230522602_7
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