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

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• Before Equiano: A Prehistory of the North American Slave Narrative by Zachary McLeod Hutchins
• Lacey Hunter

Before Equiano: A Prehistory of the North American Slave Narrative. By Zachary McLeod Hutchins. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. Pp. xiv, 291. Paper, $32.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-7154-3; cloth, $99.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-7153-6.)

Before Equiano: A Prehistory of the North American Slave Narrative is a thoughtful and compelling reassessment of this early American literary genre. Commonly positioned within African American canonical traditions, this writing type has long been defined by scholars as one that emerged within the context of a racialized system of chattel slavery. Acknowledging the genre’s notable links to the narratives of Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and others, Zachary McLeod Hutchins argues that this narrow purview of the category limits our understanding of slavery during the American colonial period. Consequently, he notes, Before Equiano is “a prehistory of the North American slave narrative, tracing the genre back to its origins in eighteenth-century newspapers and following its evolution into a literary form with well-established tropes” (p. 2). Hutchins provides a well-organized, thoroughly [End Page 404] researched book that examines thousands of print news advertisements and challenges its audience to think beyond the traditionally accepted definitions of the slave narrative.

Focusing primarily on print newspapers from Boston, Massachusetts, Hutchins demonstrates that the city’s documentation of slave trading is critical to understanding its unfolding in the Americas. Linking the details of slave advertisements to the larger development of colonial North America, the book paints a vivid portrayal of slavery’s evolution from the eighteenth century through the nineteenth. Indeed, Before Equiano is a striking complement to Peter H. Wood’s Strange New Land: Africans in Colonial America (New York, 1996), in which Wood documents the political and cultural shifts across the Americas that marked the decline of an early fluid system of enslavement and the rise of a rigid one.

The main thrust of Before Equiano is its argument for an expanded consideration of slave narratives to include print news advertisements. Specifically, Hutchins asserts that eighteenth-century newspaper ads should be understood as the foundation of the slave narrative genre. Paying careful attention to the language and frequency of slave ads through the colonial period of the United States, Hutchins makes a convincing argument that the earliest narratives about slavery are not the full-length accounts written by African Americans. Instead, he pushes his audience to consider the narratives of historical figures such as Olaudah Equiano and Venture Smith as extensions of a broader eighteenth-century tradition.

Hutchins contends that early-eighteenth-century slave advertisements primed audiences for the full-length bound books popularized during the latter half of that century and through the next. Serialized publication of slave sales, runaway slave ads, and correspondence forged an audience that was actively and imaginatively engaged with the daily or weekly content they consumed. Through his own imaginative readings of news descriptions, Hutchins invites readers to employ a level of creative inquiry as he outlines several serialized accounts found in newspapers such as the Boston News-Letter, Boston Gazette, and Boston Evening Post.

Throughout the book, Hutchins emphasizes the point that print newspapers served as scaffolding for the gradual identity construction of American colonists. In this way, Before Equiano evokes an intellectual history that traces the maturity of an early national sense of self. Hutchins underscores this approach by considering the nuances of the term slavery within the newspapers he explores. Hutchins’s critical interrogation of the language used in his sources also bolsters his assertion that European and Indigenous populations must be included in academic discussions about the larger tradition of slave narrative writing. His book’s thoughtful use of sources and its close examination of language strengthen his call to reassess the slave narrative as a genre.

In every way, Hutchins demonstrates the importance of reexamining early American history to gain deeper breadth and depth in the study of national history. While there are limits to the imaginative work that Hutchins calls for from modern-day scholars and readers, Before Equiano is an excellent reflection of...