Olaudah Equiano's Enchantments

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.