Before Equiano: A Prehistory of the North American Slave Narrative by Zachary McLeod Hutchins (review)

IF 0.3 3区 文学 0 LITERATURE, AMERICAN
Jeannine Marie Delombard
{"title":"Before Equiano: A Prehistory of the North American Slave Narrative by Zachary McLeod Hutchins (review)","authors":"Jeannine Marie Delombard","doi":"10.1353/eal.2024.a918915","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\n<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Before Equiano: A Prehistory of the North American Slave Narrative</em> by Zachary McLeod Hutchins <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Jeannine Marie Delombard (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Before Equiano: A Prehistory of the North American Slave Narrative</em><br/> <small>zachary mcleod hutchins</small><br/> University of North Carolina Press, 2022<br/> 306 pp. <p><em>Before Equiano</em>'s subtitle suggests that this new monograph offers a study of the texts and circumstances that yielded the genre known as the slave narrative, one of whose conventional starting points is <em>The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gusatvus Vassa, the African</em> (1789). It quickly becomes apparent, however, that <em>Before Equiano</em> is more revisionist history than \"prehistory.\" In the introduction, Hutchins asserts that \"because eighteenth-century newspapers were the source of the period's most numerous and popular materials on slavery and because their language and ideas shaped the first book-length, stand-alone auto/biographies of enslaved Africans, they should be read as slave narratives\" (21). The claim is not simply that representations of slavery in the early American periodical press \"shaped\" the emergent genre but that \"eighteenth-century newspapers\" <em>themselves</em> \"should be read as slave narratives\" (21). As it turns out, the methodological intervention centers not on the newspapers so much as <strong>[End Page 158]</strong> how we read them. Calling on today's literary critics to adopt the \"imaginative\" reading that he attributes to eighteenth-century newspaper audiences, Hutchins proposes to redefine the slave narrative itself (7).</p> <p>From Dorothy Porter and Marian Wilson Starling in the 1930s and 1940s, to Frances Smith Foster, John Blassingame, and William Andrews in the 1970s and 1980s, scholars of the slave narrative traced the genre's origins to ephemeral and often firsthand accounts of the lives of enslaved individuals in colonial newspapers, letters, broadsides, and pamphlets. Hutchins, by contrast, is interested in a much broader aggregate of \"materials on slavery\" (21)—advertisements for fugitives from slavery and accounts of trials or insurrections involving enslaved people, but also, crucially, foreign dispatches treating enslavement as a common wartime practice. Hutchins locates the beginnings of the genre in the minds of \"imaginative readers\" who \"might be said to have mentally authored the first slave narratives as they consumed brief newspaper reports of enslaved individuals\" (7). In this way, he maintains, \"slave narratives were read by both black and white readers, long before they were bound and sold—even before they were written\" (7). Moreover, because bondage was \"a condition rhetorically and philosophically associated with war,\" he contends, these \"stories of slavery were always embedded in a global political context\" (21). As discussed below, Hutchins most powerfully illustrates the latter claim in chapters 3 and 4. Along the way, however, \"the slave narrative\" ceases to denote an account of the experience of enslavement and instead refers to any one of a number of \"stories of slavery\" (21).</p> <p>Indeed, <em>Before Equiano</em> concludes by suggesting that, because John \"Dickinson conceives of himself and his fellow colonists as slaves pressed into bondage by British duties\" in the series of essays he originally published in the <em>Pennsylvania Chronicle</em> (1767–68), his <em>Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania</em> \"might be described as one of the first North American slave narratives\" (182). In this telling, it is Dickinson's belated white interlocutor, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur who, in <em>Letters from an American Farmer</em> (1782), anticipates the nineteenth-century development of the genre with, as Hutchins puts it, \"his advocacy for racializing the slave narrative\" (188). Crèvecoeur's portrayals of enslaved people in <em>Letters</em>, Hutchins suggests, offered a reality check to the American colonists' rhetorical self-fashioning as the \"slaves\" of their British masters. The most devastating such portrayal (which Hutchins quotes at length) appears in letter 9, when Crèvecoeur's <strong>[End Page 159]</strong> narrator, James, finds a Black man suspended in a cage, deprived of food and water, and slowly becoming carrion for insects and birds of prey. But the gothic scene also illuminates, contra Hutchins, the importance of distinguishing the slave narrative from other \"stories of slavery.\" The grotesquely mutilated body of Crèvecoeur's caged slave offers a \"shocking spectacle,\" even as it attests to the voyeurism of the white author, his narrator, and his presumed readership (J. Hector St. John de...</p> </p>","PeriodicalId":44043,"journal":{"name":"EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3000,"publicationDate":"2024-02-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eal.2024.a918915","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LITERATURE, AMERICAN","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:

  • Before Equiano: A Prehistory of the North American Slave Narrative by Zachary McLeod Hutchins
  • Jeannine Marie Delombard (bio)
Before Equiano: A Prehistory of the North American Slave Narrative
zachary mcleod hutchins
University of North Carolina Press, 2022
306 pp.

Before Equiano's subtitle suggests that this new monograph offers a study of the texts and circumstances that yielded the genre known as the slave narrative, one of whose conventional starting points is The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gusatvus Vassa, the African (1789). It quickly becomes apparent, however, that Before Equiano is more revisionist history than "prehistory." In the introduction, Hutchins asserts that "because eighteenth-century newspapers were the source of the period's most numerous and popular materials on slavery and because their language and ideas shaped the first book-length, stand-alone auto/biographies of enslaved Africans, they should be read as slave narratives" (21). The claim is not simply that representations of slavery in the early American periodical press "shaped" the emergent genre but that "eighteenth-century newspapers" themselves "should be read as slave narratives" (21). As it turns out, the methodological intervention centers not on the newspapers so much as [End Page 158] how we read them. Calling on today's literary critics to adopt the "imaginative" reading that he attributes to eighteenth-century newspaper audiences, Hutchins proposes to redefine the slave narrative itself (7).

From Dorothy Porter and Marian Wilson Starling in the 1930s and 1940s, to Frances Smith Foster, John Blassingame, and William Andrews in the 1970s and 1980s, scholars of the slave narrative traced the genre's origins to ephemeral and often firsthand accounts of the lives of enslaved individuals in colonial newspapers, letters, broadsides, and pamphlets. Hutchins, by contrast, is interested in a much broader aggregate of "materials on slavery" (21)—advertisements for fugitives from slavery and accounts of trials or insurrections involving enslaved people, but also, crucially, foreign dispatches treating enslavement as a common wartime practice. Hutchins locates the beginnings of the genre in the minds of "imaginative readers" who "might be said to have mentally authored the first slave narratives as they consumed brief newspaper reports of enslaved individuals" (7). In this way, he maintains, "slave narratives were read by both black and white readers, long before they were bound and sold—even before they were written" (7). Moreover, because bondage was "a condition rhetorically and philosophically associated with war," he contends, these "stories of slavery were always embedded in a global political context" (21). As discussed below, Hutchins most powerfully illustrates the latter claim in chapters 3 and 4. Along the way, however, "the slave narrative" ceases to denote an account of the experience of enslavement and instead refers to any one of a number of "stories of slavery" (21).

Indeed, Before Equiano concludes by suggesting that, because John "Dickinson conceives of himself and his fellow colonists as slaves pressed into bondage by British duties" in the series of essays he originally published in the Pennsylvania Chronicle (1767–68), his Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania "might be described as one of the first North American slave narratives" (182). In this telling, it is Dickinson's belated white interlocutor, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur who, in Letters from an American Farmer (1782), anticipates the nineteenth-century development of the genre with, as Hutchins puts it, "his advocacy for racializing the slave narrative" (188). Crèvecoeur's portrayals of enslaved people in Letters, Hutchins suggests, offered a reality check to the American colonists' rhetorical self-fashioning as the "slaves" of their British masters. The most devastating such portrayal (which Hutchins quotes at length) appears in letter 9, when Crèvecoeur's [End Page 159] narrator, James, finds a Black man suspended in a cage, deprived of food and water, and slowly becoming carrion for insects and birds of prey. But the gothic scene also illuminates, contra Hutchins, the importance of distinguishing the slave narrative from other "stories of slavery." The grotesquely mutilated body of Crèvecoeur's caged slave offers a "shocking spectacle," even as it attests to the voyeurism of the white author, his narrator, and his presumed readership (J. Hector St. John de...

艾奎亚诺之前:Zachary McLeod Hutchins 所著的《北美奴隶叙事史前史》(评论)
以下是内容的简要摘录,以代替摘要:评论者 在艾奎亚诺之前Zachary McLeod Hutchins 著,Jeannine Marie Delombard 译(简历) Before Equiano:北卡罗来纳大学出版社,2022 年,306 页。艾奎亚诺之前》的副标题表明,这本新专著研究的是产生奴隶叙事这一体裁的文本和环境,其传统出发点之一是《非洲人奥劳达-艾奎亚诺或古萨特维斯-瓦萨的有趣叙事》(1789 年)。不过,很快我们就会发现,《在艾奎亚诺之前》与其说是 "史前史",不如说是修正史。哈钦斯在导言中断言,"由于十八世纪的报纸是这一时期有关奴隶制的数量最多、最受欢迎的材料的来源,也由于它们的语言和思想塑造了第一部长篇的、独立的非洲奴隶自传/传记,它们应该被当作奴隶叙事来解读"(21)。这种说法不仅仅是说美国早期期刊报刊对奴隶制的表述 "塑造 "了这一新兴体裁,而是说 "十八世纪报刊 "本身 "应被解读为奴隶叙事"(21)。事实证明,方法论干预的中心不是报纸,而是我们如何阅读报纸。哈钦斯呼吁今天的文学评论家采用他认为十八世纪报纸受众所采用的 "富有想象力 "的阅读方式,建议重新定义奴隶叙事本身(7)。从 20 世纪 30 年代和 40 年代的多萝西-波特(Dorothy Porter)和玛丽安-威尔逊-斯塔琳(Marian Wilson Starling),到 70 年代和 80 年代的弗朗西斯-史密斯-福斯特(Frances Smith Foster)、约翰-布拉辛格姆(John Blassingame)和威廉-安德鲁斯(William Andrews),研究奴隶叙事的学者们将这一体裁的起源追溯到殖民时期报纸、信件、大字报和小册子中对被奴役者生活的短暂且往往是第一手的描述。相比之下,哈钦斯感兴趣的是范围更广的 "奴隶制材料"(21)--有关奴隶制逃亡者的广告、涉及被奴役者的审判或叛乱的描述,以及至关重要的将奴役作为战时常见做法的外国公文。哈钦斯将这一体裁的开端定位在 "富有想象力的读者 "的头脑中,他们 "可以说是在阅读报纸上关于被奴役者的简短报道时,在精神上创作了第一批奴隶叙事"(7)。他认为,这样一来,"早在奴隶被捆绑和贩卖之前,甚至在奴隶被写成文字之前,黑人和白人读者就已经阅读了奴隶叙事"(7)。此外,由于奴役是 "一种在修辞和哲学上与战争相关联的状况",他认为,这些 "奴隶制的故事总是被嵌入全球政治背景之中"(21)。如下文所述,哈钦斯在第 3 章和第 4 章中最有力地说明了后一种说法。然而,一路走来,"奴隶叙事 "不再是对奴役经历的描述,而是指众多 "奴隶制故事 "中的任何一个(21)。事实上,《艾奎亚诺之前》最后指出,由于约翰-迪金森 "在他最初发表于《宾夕法尼亚纪事》(1767-68 年)的一系列文章中,把自己和他的殖民地同胞看作是被英国的义务所奴役的奴隶",他的《宾夕法尼亚一个农民的来信》"可以说是北美最早的奴隶叙事之一"(182)。Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur在《一个美国农民的来信》(1782 年)中,用 Hutchins 的说法,"他主张将奴隶叙事种族化"(188),从而预示了这种体裁在 19 世纪的发展。Hutchins 认为,Crèvecoeur 在《书信》中对被奴役者的描写为美国殖民者在言辞上自我塑造为英国主人的 "奴隶 "提供了现实的检验。其中最具破坏性的描写(哈钦斯详细引用了这一描写)出现在第 9 封信中,克雷夫科尔 [尾页 159] 的叙述者詹姆斯发现一个黑人被吊在笼子里,没有食物和水,慢慢变成了昆虫和鸟类的腐肉。但是,与哈钦斯相反,这个哥特式场景也揭示了将奴隶叙事与其他 "奴隶制故事 "区分开来的重要性。克雷夫科尔笔下被关在笼子里的奴隶的肢体残缺不全,令人 "触目惊心",同时也证明了白人作者、他的叙述者和他假定的读者(J. Hector St.
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
求助全文
约1分钟内获得全文 求助全文
来源期刊
EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE
EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE LITERATURE, AMERICAN-
CiteScore
0.30
自引率
33.30%
发文量
62
×
引用
GB/T 7714-2015
复制
MLA
复制
APA
复制
导出至
BibTeX EndNote RefMan NoteFirst NoteExpress
×
提示
您的信息不完整,为了账户安全,请先补充。
现在去补充
×
提示
您因"违规操作"
具体请查看互助需知
我知道了
×
提示
确定
请完成安全验证×
copy
已复制链接
快去分享给好友吧!
我知道了
右上角分享
点击右上角分享
0
联系我们:info@booksci.cn Book学术提供免费学术资源搜索服务,方便国内外学者检索中英文文献。致力于提供最便捷和优质的服务体验。 Copyright © 2023 布克学术 All rights reserved.
京ICP备2023020795号-1
ghs 京公网安备 11010802042870号
Book学术文献互助
Book学术文献互助群
群 号:481959085
Book学术官方微信