Journal articles: 'Interesting narrative of the life of Olaudah Equiano (Equiano, Olaudah)'

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Williams, Bryan C. "Olaudah Equiano's Enchantments." Early American Literature 58, no. 2 (2023): 337–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/eal.2023.a903778.

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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.

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Johnson, Sylvester A. "Colonialism, Biblical World-Making, and Temporalities in Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative." Church History 77, no. 4 (2008): 1003–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0009640708001601.

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The autobiography of Olaudah Equiano (1745–1797) offers an unusual portrait of the dynamic relationship between scripture and colonialism. In 1789 Equiano, who also went by the name Gustavus Vassa, related his experience of slavery to support abolitionism in Britain in the form of a best-selling, two-volume autobiography titled The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself. Equiano's autobiography comprises a striking description of religion and culture among the Igbo of West Africa, the nation with which he identified by birth. According to Equiano, the Igbo were descended from ancient Jews, and their religion was a modern survival of ancient biblical religion. This claim, seemingly casual at first, is actually a complicated maneuver that reveals how deeply he had mined a trove of biblical commentary to shape his interesting narrative for a skeptical readership. The early modern genre of biblical commentary, which was deeply influenced by the exigencies of European colonialism, constitutes in its own right an authoritative literature that proved quite useful for Equiano.

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Okoli, Chinaza Amaeze. "Olaudah Equiano and Freedom of the Scenes: Embodied Performances in Equiano's Interesting Narrative." Early American Literature 58, no. 3 (2023): 619–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/eal.2023.a909702.

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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.

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Lee, Catherine Ji Won. "The Slave Narrative and the Modern Constitution: Latourian Agency in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano." Essays in Romanticism 31, no. 1 (2024): 43–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/eir.2024.31.1.5.

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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.

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Brooks, Joanna. "Soul Matters." PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 128, no. 4 (2013): 947–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2013.128.4.947.

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Is there a new “religious turn” in early american studies? or do declensions and revivals in scholarly attention to Religious matters suggest something about how religion and spirituality are lived? Witness an episode from the life of Olaudah Equiano, as recorded in his Interesting Narrative (1789), one of the new classics of early American literary study. It is October 1773, and the twenty-eight-year-old Equiano finds himself once again home in London. London, of course, is home in name only. Where is home for Equiano, really? Is it Igbo West Africa, the Carolinas, Philadelphia, London, or the black Atlantic itself? Did Equiano himself even know?

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E. Lovejoy, Paul. "Olaudah Equiano ou Gustavus Vassa: o que há em um nome?" Fronteiras 24, no. 43 (2022): 14–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.30612/frh.v24i43.16560.

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Este artigo trata da polêmica sobre os significados do nome do autor de The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (Londres, 1789). A polêmica reside nas formas como Equiano ou Vassa, em parte se relacionava com o seu local de nascimento. A escolha do nome que ele cotidianamente usava provoca questões sobre o modo como os estudiosos querem compreender o autor, mas também como o próprio homem se representava na época em que viveu e escreveu sua autobiografia. Argumento que o autor de The Interesting Narrative usou seu nome de nascimento, Olaudah Equiano, como prova de sua origem africana, e não como um nome pelo qual queria ser conhecido, Gustavus Vassa. Assim, o dilema é porque os estudiosos se referem a ele por seu nome africano, quando ele optou por não o fazer. Sugere-se que o uso do nome de nascimento tem mais a ver com a política de representação e correção política das gerações posteriores de estudos, não com a intenção do homem. A razão para o debate sobre seu nascimento tem mais a ver com o confronto atual entre erudição literária e interpretação histórica do que com possíveis interpretações e representações errôneas do passado.

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Matiu, Ovidiu. "Olaudah Equiano’s Biography: Fact or/and Fiction." East-West Cultural Passage 22, no. 2 (2022): 52–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/ewcp-2022-0015.

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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.

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Dahal, Arvind. "Evoking the Ethics of Freedom in the Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano." Interdisciplinary Journal of Management and Social Sciences 2, no. 1 (2021): 1–4. http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/ijmss.v2i1.36722.

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In this article an attempt has been made to analyze how the abolitionist literature of the Enlightenment Period worked to evoke sympathy for the slaves and hatred for the slavers by using the same doctrines used by the Christians to inflict atrocities and exert superiority over Non-Christians. In doing so, the article explores how these narratives debunked the notion of enlightenment and argues that it was used not to emancipate mankind but to endorse slavery.

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Leelathawornchai, Satit. "How Utility Pleases: Sentiment and Utility in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah EquIano." Eighteenth-Century Studies 55, no. 1 (2021): 45–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/ecs.2021.0107.

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Bulthuis, Kyle T. ":The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Written by Himself, with Related Documents." Sixteenth Century Journal 51, no. 3 (2020): 801–3. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/scj5103105.

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Arch, Stephen Carl. "The Female American, and: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (review)." Eighteenth-Century Fiction 14, no. 2 (2002): 240–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/ecf.2002.0008.

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Petersen, Anne Ring, and Karen-Margrethe Simonsen. "Relationel komparatisme." K&K - Kultur og Klasse 47, no. 127 (2019): 29–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.7146/kok.v47i127.114741.

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This article addresses a question crucial to contemporary cultural analysis: the question of how to compare and what to compare in a globalized world. Modern comparativism has effectively undermined the very foundation of historical comparativism, i.e. the idea of confined and segregated (national) cultures and Eurocentric perspectives and perceptions of what is historically significant, and what is not. The article opens with a discussion of some important critical revisions of comparative methodologies in the fields of comparative literature and art history, and then moves on to call for a relational comparativism that is attentive to three aspects: context, dynamics/agency and circulation. To indicate what the implications of a relational comparativism might be, we conclude with two case studies of the autobiography The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789) and the commemorative sculpture I Am Queen Mary (2018) by artists Jeannette Ehlers and La Vaughn Belle. Both works are related to the history of slavery; a history that in significant ways points to the need for rethinking comparativism.

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Simmons, Caitlin. "The Sea as Respite: Challenging Dispossession and Re-Constructing Identity in the Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano." Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 18 (July 18, 2018): 75–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.17077/2168-569x.1507.

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Kelleter, Frank. "Ethnic Self-Dramatization and Technologies of Travel in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (1789)." Early American Literature 39, no. 1 (2004): 67–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/eal.2004.0012.

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Bugg, John. "The Other Interesting Narrative: Olaudah Equiano's Public Book Tour." PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 121, no. 5 (2006): 1424–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2006.121.5.1424.

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This essay examines the pre- and posthistory of The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789). Opening with a reconsideration of Vincent Carretta's influential claim that Equiano fabricated an African birthplace, I consider how Equiano's strategies of self-fashioning inform his trailblazing book tour of the British Isles in the early 1790s. If Equiano self-consciously designed his autobiography to become a best seller, his book tour performed the abolitionist manifesto that he was reluctant to put into print, as during his stops at cities and towns across the nation he worked to convert sympathetic readers into active abolitionists. Under the long shadow of the Pitt ministry's suppression of political activism in the 1790s, Equiano formed alliances with working-class and radical figures in Britain and Ireland, drawing on Shakespeare's Othello to develop a familiar public persona he could market during his book tour. (JB)

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Smith, Cassander L. "The Interesting Narrative by Olaudah Equiano, ed. Brycchan Carey." Eighteenth-Century Fiction 31, no. 4 (2019): 767–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/ecf.31.4.767.

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Venkata, Kaushik Tekur. "Police Time: Equiano, Blackness, and Custody." Eighteenth-Century Fiction 36, no. 1 (2024): 111–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/ecf.36.1.111.

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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.

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Samuels, Wilfred D. "Disguised Voice in The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African." Black American Literature Forum 19, no. 2 (1985): 64. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2904008.

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Sabino, Robin, and Jennifer Hall. "The Path Not Taken: Cultural Identity in the Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano." MELUS 24, no. 1 (1999): 5. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/467904.

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Brown, Matthew D. "Olaudah Equiano and the Sailor's Telegraph: The Interesting Narrative and the Source of Black Abolitionism." Callaloo 36, no. 1 (2013): 191–201. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/cal.2013.0059.

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Suparman, Suparman. "AMERICAN ENSLAVEMENT AS SEEN IN NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLAS & IN THE INTERESTING NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF OLAUDAH EQUIAO." Kajian Linguistik dan Sastra 17, no. 2 (2017): 151–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.23917/kls.v17i2.4515.

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Mimetic approach is used in this study to reveal the practice of slavery depicted in two novels "narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas" and "The Interesting Narrative of the life of Olaudah Equiao". The findings show that novels have common ground that is the practice of the slavery of blacks Africans by the whites in America. In some aspects, the slaveholders treated their slave inhumanly, savagely, and brutally. The slaves were really treated like animals in the ways of providing them food, shelter. clothes, and dispensation of rest. They were forbiden to learn of how to write and read. They were forced to work hard without having enough rest. However, when they got wage, they had to give it to their masters. Female slaves were whipped and tortured savagely, and their children were tortured to death. These are the examples of the brutality of the slaveholders.Key words: slavery, slaveholders, slaves, inhumanity, discrimination, and oppression

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Nicolazzo, Sal. "Equiano's Shipwreck: Insurance, Risk and Peril in Plantationocene Oceans." Eighteenth Century 63, no. 3-4 (2022): 275–93. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/ecy.2022.a927520.

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

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Iromuanya, Julie. "Retrofuturist Speculations: Race as Technology in Olaudah Equiano’s Vision of a Future." Journal of Black Studies, April 25, 2023, 002193472311660. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/00219347231166018.

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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.

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Aleksandrov, Gleb. "America, England and the British Empire in the 18th Century African Slave Narratives." Journal of the Institute for African Studies, June 30, 2020, 51–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.31132/2412-5717-2020-51-2-51-65.

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In the 18th century England several slave narratives were published and became quite popular. The best known – and the best researched – among them was Olaudah Equiano’s “The Interesting Narrative…”, one of the key works of the early abolitionist movement. Equiano’s (and other former slaves’) critique of slavery and their place in contemporary society is examined extensively in existing studies. But the British world was not limited to the colonies where the entire economic order was based on slave labour. These colonies existed in a wider context of the British Empire, with its own internal diversity of culture and everyday life. This article examines the way in which the slave narratives’ authors – Olaudah Equiano, Ukawsaw Gronniosaw and Ayuba Suleiman Diallo – perceived and described the Empire, its institutions, its cultural practices and the relations between its constituent parts, particularly between England and colonial America and West India.

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Hulbert, Annette. "Teaching Mary Wollstonecraft's Travelogue of Historical Trauma." ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830 12, no. 2 (2022). http://dx.doi.org/10.5038/2157-7129.12.2.1307.

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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.

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Parra Alonso, José David. "Extrañas coincidencias entre obras de marginados: las novelas picarescas y The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano." Philobiblion: revista de literaturas hispánicas 6, no. 2017 (2017). http://dx.doi.org/10.15366/philobiblion2017.6.005.

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Journal articles on the topic 'Interesting narrative of the life of Olaudah Equiano (Equiano, Olaudah)'

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