The Orations on the Abolition of the Slave Trade and the Uses of Print in the Early Black Atlantic

Scholarship on the early black Atlantic can benefit from more attention to the functions black writers assigned to print. Paul Gilroy’s initial concern with circumatlantic travel in The Black Atlantic has led most scholars to focus on the experience of geographical dislocation as an index for a writer’s participation in the nonnational culture of the African diaspora. In their introduction to Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic, for example, Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould single out Ignatius Sancho as an “emblem” of early black Atlantic writers because he was “[b]orn to enslaved African parents on a ship in the Middle Passage bearing its human cargo from Africa to the Americas and then brought to England” (1).¹ Although the focus on biographical experience is crucial, it has not led to an examination of the media-specific functions of print publication. This essay proposes that the uses of print in an interconnected Atlantic economy helped some writers refigure the black Atlantic world as bound not only by the violence of dislocation but also by print’s ability to constitute a counterpublic imagined as limitless and unending.² The importance of this particular function of print becomes clear through considering a series of relatively unknown orations published annually between 1808 and 1823 to commemorate the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. These orations are quite different from the autobiographical texts commonly discussed by early black Atlantic scholars. They were written by people who lived locally—figures who, unlike Sancho, Olaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatley, and others, cannot derive their authority on the black Atlantic from their own experiences of dislocation. Instead of using the story of an individual life to explore black Atlantic double consciousness, these orations harness the recurring occasion of their production to project such consciousness onto the far-reaching community of readers that print could invoke.

Understanding the full implications of such projection requires taking seriously an important lesson of recent work in transatlantic book history: that print publication in this period carried with it possibility of textual travel.³ We should remember that Paul Gilroy’s now familiar chronotope of the ship crossing and recrossing the Atlantic, so evocative of geographical dislocation, also refers to the movement and dissemination of texts. Gilroy proposes “the image of ships in motion across the spaces between Europe, America, Africa, and the Caribbean as a central organising symbol” for a theory of modernity not delimited by the concept of the nation-state. While this chronotope “focus[es] attention on the middle passage” and “on the various projects for redemptive return to an African homeland,” it also invokes the transatlantic “circulation of ideas” and “the movement of key cultural and political artefacts: tracts, books, gramophone records, and choirs” (4). The orations on the abolition of the slave trade emerged from and entered into the fluid networks of exchange that Gilroy mentions here, networks that scholars of book history and print culture have only begun to describe.

This essay explores how print helps black authors of these orations constitute a counterpublic as it considers two related arguments the texts inspire. The public conjured in these texts is defined, specifically, by the dual expression of the “politics of fulfilment” and “politics of transfiguration” that Gilroy argues animates black Atlantic cultural expression (37–38). Also, the way these orators use and theorize print complicates a description of the early American public sphere that generalizes about the separation of oral and printed expression.⁴ This is because they display a striking self-awareness about the future life of their texts in print. My concern with the uses of print builds toward an analysis of one extraordinary moment, in which an orator announces that he holds a printed version of a previous commemorative address before his audience as he delivers his own oration. In this self-reflexive gesture, the speaker overlays his auditors’ experience of hearing the oration with the presence of an indeterminable future audience. His fellow orators think of print this way, too; in a wish...