Abstract
In January 1838, the abolitionist newspaper the British Emancipator introduced its description of the ill-treatment of George Robinson, a Jamaican apprentice (former slave), with the claim that: ‘the following brief history of the cruel wrongs and sufferings endured by this innocent victim of the accursed system of apprenticeship may be relied on with as much confidence as the “Narrative of James Williams”’.1 The text referred to was A Narrative of Events since the First of August, 1834, by James Williams, an Apprenticed Labourer in Jamaica.2 This incidental remark confirms that, although it has now been largely forgotten, James Williams’s Narrative of Events was widely known immediately after its publication in 1837. The Narrative went through at least seven editions in 1837 and 1838, and was also reprinted in whole or in part in newspapers in both Britain and Jamaica.3 Williams’s sufferings and struggles were, briefly, so well known that they could be used to guide British readers’ expectations and understandings of other similar stories. The introduction to the account of George Robinson’s experiences also indicates the centrality of evaluations of truth-claims and authenticity in the publication and reception of this and other writing by and about enslaved and apprenticed people.
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Notes
James Williams, A Narrative of Events since the First of August, 1834, by James Williams, an Apprenticed Labourer in Jamaica (1837), ed. Diana Paton (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001).
For details of the editions see Williams, Narrative of Events, pp. lvii—lxii. For another reference in passing to ‘James Williams’ sufferings’ see John Candler, Extracts from the Journal of John Candler whilst Travelling in Jamaica Part II (London: Harvey and Dalton, 1841), p. 34.
Rafia Zafar, We Wear the Mask: African Americans Write American Literature, 1760–1870 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 9–10.
For one such work see Zafar, We Wear the Mask, which unpacks racial essentialisms while remaining resolutely tied to a nationalist paradigm of ‘American writing’. Other important recent work in this tradition includes Dickson Bruce, The Origins of African American Literature, 1680–1865 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001); Blyden Jackson, A History of A fro-American Literature, vol. 1: The Long Beginning, 1746–1895 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), and the canon-forming volume edited by William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris, The Oxford Companion to African American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1993); Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould, eds, Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001); George B. Handley, Postslavery Literature in the Americas: Family Portraits in Black and White (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000).
Emilia Viotti da Costa, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Mary Turner, Slaves and Missionaries: The Disintegration ofJamaican Slave Society, 1787–1834 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982).
On apprenticeship, which was abolished after four years, in 1838, see Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), part 1; Swithin Wilmot, ‘Not Full Free’: The Ex-Slaves and the Apprenticeship System in Jamaica, 1834–1838’, Jamaica Journal, 17 (1984), 2–10.
The results of his investigations were published as Joseph Sturge and Thomas Harvey, The Westlndies in 1837 (London: Hamilton, Adams, and Co., 1838).
William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autohiograp•hy, 1760–1865 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), pp. 1–4.
Ibid., p. 1.
James Williams, Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave, who was for Several Years a Driver on a Cotton Plantation in Alabama (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society; Boston: Isaac Knapp, 1838).
The controversy is discussed in Henry Louis Gates Jr, ‘From Wheatley to Douglass: The Politics of Displacement’, in Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays, ed. Eric. J. Sundquist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 47–65, and Andrews, To Tell a Free Story, pp. 87–9.
Robert B. Stepto, ‘Narration, Authentication, and Authorial Control in Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of 1845’, in Afro-American Literature: TheReconstruction of Instruction, ed. Dexter Fisher and Robert B. Stepto (New York: Modern Language Association, 1979), pp. 178–211; Robert Stepto, From Behind the Veil: A Study ofAfroAmerican Literary History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), ch. 1; John Sekora, ‘Black Message/White Envelope: Genre, Authenticity, and Authority in the Antebellum Slave Narrative’, Callaloo, 34 (1987), 482–515; James Olney, I Was Born’: Slave Narratives, their Status as Autobiography and as Literature’, in The Slave’s Narrative, ed. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates Jr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 148–75.
Menchfu’s testimonio, I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, ed. Elisabeth Burgos-Debray (London: Verso, 1984), was attacked in David Stoll, Rigoberta Menchu and the Story ofAll Poor Guatemalans (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999). For discussions see Arturo Arias, ed., The Rigoberta Menchd Controversy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). Justus Reid Weiner attacked Edward Said’s Out ofPlace: A Memoir (London: Granta, 2000) in “‘My Beautiful Old House” and Other Fabrications by Edward Said’, Commentary, 108, 2 (1999), 23–32. For discussion see, among others, Amos Elon, ‘Exile’s Return’, New York Review of Books, 18 November 1999, and Harvey Blume’s interview with Said, ‘Setting the Record Straight’, The Atlantic Unbound, 22 September 1999 (also online at <http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/interviews/ba990922.htm>, accessed 13 July 2003).
Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings (1789), ed. Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin, 1995), pp. 5–14 (p. 5).
Mary Prince, The Histoty of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave. Related by Herself (1831), ed. Sara Salih (London: Penguin, 2000).
On Jamaican Creole see Frederic G. Cassidy, Jamaica Talk: Three Hundred Years of the English Language in Jamaica (London: Macmillan, 1961); F. G. Cassidy and R. B. LePage, Dictionary ofJamaican English (1967), 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Barbara Lalla and Jean D’Costa, eds, Language in Exile: Three Hundred Years of Jamaican Creole (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990).
For the concept of the ‘creole continuum’ see David DeCamp, ‘Toward a Generative Analysis of a Post-Creole Speech Continuum’, in Pidginization andCreolization ofLanguages, ed. Dell Hymes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), pp. 349–70 (p. 350).
Lalla and D’Costa, Language in Exile, p. 165, interpret the Narrative in roughly this way, using it as a source of ‘mesolectal’ Jamaican Creole.
Andrew Levy, ‘Dialect and Convention: Harriet A. Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 45, 2 (1990), 206–19, argues that this is how Harriet Jacobs uses dialect.
Sterling Brown, ‘On Dialect Usage’, in The Slave’s Narrative, ed. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates Jr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). See also Henry Louis Gates Jr, ‘Dis and Dat: Dialect and the Descent’, in Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the ‘Racial’ Self(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 80–97. This point is not intended to deny the use by Caribbean writers of phonological representations of Caribbean speech, as recognized in, for instance, Richard Allsopp and Jeanette Allsopp, Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989); Carolyn Cooper, Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender and the ‘Vulgar’ Body of Jamaican Popular Culture (London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1993); Jean Bernabe, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Rafael Confiant, Eloge de la Créolité/In Praise of Creoleness, Bilingual Edition, trans. M. B. Taleb Khyan (Paris: Gallimard, 1993).
Gillian Whitlock, ‘Volatile Subjects: The History ofMary Prince’, in Genius in Bondage, ed. Carretta and Gould, p. 75.
Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 227. See also Rafia Zafar’s argument that the narrators of co-authored slave narratives ‘are not so helpless as other critics have assumed’ (We Wear the Mask, p. 54).
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Paton, D. (2004). ‘From His Own Lips’: The Politics of Authenticity in A Narrative of Events since the First of August, 1834, by James Williams, an Apprenticed Labourer in Jamaica . In: Carey, B., Ellis, M., Salih, S. (eds) Discourses of Slavery and Abolition. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230522602_8
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