Ethnic Self-Dramatization and Technologies of Travel in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (1789)

To read an eighteenth-century slave narrative in the twenty-first century is in many ways a very predictable act of communication. Euro-American scholars have grown used to finding truth in texts previously excluded from the canon of Western culture, but then to redefine the margins as an unanticipated center has always been a conventional way of canon building. It should not come as a suprise, therefore, if this professedly unorthodox move breeds its own orthodoxies. In fact, most people working in the humanities have probably experienced the irony of academic conferences where concepts such as difference, hybridity, and heterogeneity are praised with a uniformity and monotony that openly counteracts the semantic intention of those terms. Unfortunately, such irony can take reactionary turns. I therefore want to argue that we should take seriously the latest critical topoi, even if their subversive pathos is becoming increasingly clichéd. For the time being, they are the best tools we have in the study of language and culture, unless we want to return to essentialist notions of cultural identity or to the untenable dichotomies of Marxist criticism. As long as this can be avoided, the most reasonable way of taking issue with the new orthodoxies is to modify them from within their own theoretical field. I would like to do so with a reading of The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (1789).

While Equiano's text was anything but marginal in the eighteenth century—it was, in fact, a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic—its reputation did decline during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Academic interest in Equiano revived only after Paul Edwards edited Equiano's Travels in 1967, but it was with Vincent Carretta's comprehensively annotated 1995 edition of collected writings, including the Interesting Narrative, that Equiano entered the reading lists of English Departments all over the world. In recent years, there have been two more paperback editions, so that the Interesting Narrative is now on its way to becoming a classic of the language.¹ Against this background, it is immediately tempting to read Equiano's autobiography as an example of cultural hybridity in the age of colonialism. If we want to do so, it is useful to remember that in contemporary cultural theory, the term hybridity functions as a polemical term whose contention is directed against the idea of cultural purity in all its shapes. Especially as defined by Homi K. Bhabha, the concept of hybridity objects not only to openly racist ideologies but also to the liberal discourse of assimilation that supposedly reduces cultural differences to folkloristic, indeed tourist, attractions. More than that, from the critical perspective proposed by Bhabha, even the well-intentioned yearning for multicultural diversity must become suspect as a late variety of Western exoticism and as an unexpected continuation of eighteenth-century colonialism (see Bhabha).

In order to counter folkloristic, tourist, or multicultural forms of neocolonialism, postcolonial theory reminds us that cultural identity is always the result of complex processes of exchange. While earlier approaches to colonial literature tended to describe intercultural contact in terms of authenticity or assimilation, postcolonial criticism conceives of encounters between different cultures and ethnicities as inherently mutual. According to this view, colonial identities are never preestablished or stable, but inescapably dynamic and hybrid. Mary Louise Pratt, in one of the most influential studies on this topic, has proposed the term contact zone to stress the permeability of colonial spaces of interaction. Similarly, Richard White speaks of a middle ground between Euro-American and Native American cultures: an almost neutral territory for reciprocal acts of intermixture and appropriation. Most recently, Paul Gilroy has extended this argument to colonial subjects of African descent whom he describes as actors in an intercultural network called "the black Atlantic," which comprises North American, British, African, and Carribean life-worlds.² For all these critics, the encounter between colonizing and colonized people is marked by strategic reciprocity and the basic form...