For the next few weeks, we will be discussing two Black writers who experienced enslavement and how their literary work resisted their captivity. Since so much of our focus so far has been on how white British writers represented and reflected the transatlantic slave trade and imperialism, it’s important to remember that there were always resistant voices that spoke back to these representations. We will see how they employed sophisticated artistic and rhetorical strategies to defiantly proclaim their humanity in the face of brutal racism and enslavement. Phyllis Wheatley (c. 1753 – 1784) is often cited as the first “African American” writer. She was a young enslaved women when she crafted the poems that would make up her 1773 Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. Her poems displayed an expert understanding of classical verse and used it to both address and resist her unfree condition. Indeed, her work was so learned that the text was accompanied by an “attestation” by the “most respectable characters in Boston” as proof that Wheatley indeed wrote her poems, inaugurating a racist history white people “validating” the veracity of Black artistic productions that would continue far beyond Wheatley’s case. While her writing fame led to her emancipation, she died in poverty at the age of 31. 

Olaudah Eqiuano’s Interesting Narrative (1745-1797) carries a similar attestation. Equiano, a former enslaved African who was through ingenuity able to buy his freedom, published his famous autobiography in the midst of heated debates in Britain on abolishing the slave trade. Equiano, by this time one of the 10,000-20,000 Black people living in Britain, was active in the Abolitionist movement. Though slavery in Britain itself had been struck down in 1772, the slave trade persisted until 1810 and slavery would continue in British colonies until 1831. His narrative adapted the genre of the “spiritual autobiography” (most famously represented by Augustine’s Confessions), which describes an arc of sin, conversion and rebirth, to one of the “fall” into enslavement and the “rebirth” as a free person. The Interesting Narrative was published in 1789, the same year as the French Revolution, and thus was part of the broader Enlightenment movement and its ambivalent political thinking about emancipation and freedom. So much of Equiano’s narrative concerns the difficulty of being free in a world marked by enslavement. In this sense, Equiano reverses the notion of European colonialism bringing “civilization” and “Enlightenment” to non-Western lands. Together, we will need to consider in more depth the strategies by which Equiano represents the experience of enslavement in order to further its abolition.