Teaching Olaudah Equiano’s Narrative: Pedagogical Strategies and New Perspectives Edited by Eric D. Lamore (review)

As a useful companion for stimulating classroom discussions, a tool for generating challenging and interesting assignments, or an educational enhancement for those studying and teaching Olaudah Equiano’s Narrative, one could do no better than consult Teaching Olaudah Equiano’s Narrative: Pedagogical Strategies and New Perspectives.

Editor Eric D. Lamore has assembled a far-ranging and highly qualified group of scholars to present research from a variety of viewpoints that are relevant to many fields of academic inquiry and applicable across a wide spectrum of teaching opportunities. Furthermore, the editor and authors never lose sight of their pedagogical purpose as they offer robust scholarship as context and background for practical applications that bring Equiano’s narrative to life but also complicate our simple assumptions and received wisdom about slave narratives. The authors do not shy away from the historical complications attributed to Equiano’s mysterious text but they position the controversy over its origins by recognizing how the multilayered narrative merits its place in the canon of American literature.

Anyone undertaking to teach this text will find abundant resources for appreciating its literary, historical, and cultural contexts and at the same time will be stimulated by the variety of ways in which the text resists easy categorization and facile redaction of its value. The well-crafted organizational logic developed by Lamore begins with the reader encountering “foundational discussions” that admirably raise more questions than they answer in identifying contextual frameworks for appreciating the text. A second part dives more deeply into “special topics” that complicate and enliven these foundational observations with pedagogical proposals and ideas that resist easy categorization by academic discipline. Some of these essays also offer actual experiences faced by educators and demonstrate that their pedagogical recommendations are informed by experience from sound and committed teaching. These essays also give readers terrific ways to approach the text that engage not just historical, cultural, and racial dimensions but also stylistic ones that highlight the literary merits of Equiano’s narrative, including its performative dimensions, and that engage student readers in a more nuanced understanding of the work.

The third and fourth parts of this comprehensive book are reserved for pedagogy in African American and American studies, respectively, supported by the work of scholars with extensive experience teaching the narrative. The authors make an effort to illustrate for the reader a survey of its use as a classroom tool—how it has been received, understood, and applied during the course of its presence in higher-education curricula. The authors also demonstrate the appeal and value of the narrative for young adults making their transition from adolescence to a more mature understanding of themselves and the traditions they inherited, including the historical, religious, social, and economic influences of the eighteenth-century world that shaped the text and continue to exert influence over their lives. Of particular interest to scholars who seek to place the text in conventional categories—spiritual autobiography or slave narrative, for example—are readings that resist easy categorization and instead focus on the achievement of literacy and representations of reading strategies that extend as a trope throughout African American literature.

All along the way the authors provide a wealth of information from secondary sources that enrich our appreciation of the philosophical and theological dimensions of the work and provide educators with salient historical references that position the text in concrete ways that support an evidence-based approach to understanding not just Equiano’s narrative but others that emerged from the slave narrative tradition and that share its rhetorical and metaphysical claims. Interdisciplinary in scope, this volume crosses boundaries of subject, genre, classroom context, and thematic purpose but does not lose sight of its primary objective—to demonstrate the relevance of Equiano’s narrative in educational settings and to provide instructors with the background, tools, and inspiration to continue to appreciate all the many ways in which the text satisfies...