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
• 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...