The Slave Narrative and the Modern Constitution: Latourian Agency in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano

Abstract

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.