Equiano, The African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (review)

In Equiano the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man, Vincent Carretta has culminated a remarkable historical inquiry that has already yielded Unchained Voices, a superbly annotated anthology of Anglo–Atlantic black literature, as well as equally well-researched editions of Ignatius Sancho and Ottobah Cugoano. Carretta places the late eighteenth-century African writer in the richly evoked, late eighteenth-century black Anglo–Atlantic world of the earlier works. Uncluttered by needless reference, Equiano, the African brings a similar comprehensiveness to its synthesis of the data and interpretative perspectives of studies by Angelo Costanzo, Philip Gould, Keith Sandiford, and James Walvin. This newest account of Equiano gives us an African entrepreneur intellectual at once immersed in Protestant piety, capitalist ideology, Enlightenment thought, sentimental literary discourse, and the black experience in the seafaring Atlantic. Always genial to his fellow scholars, the author sidesteps the explosive political–cultural borderlines dividing the academic turfs of these various studies.

No one, however, can touch every base and not take sides. Carretta’s Equiano emerges from a conception of liberal capitalist modernity, which provides this biography’s organizing point of view. The very expansiveness of this strategy—and its capacity to absorb so many explanatory tactics—accounts for the reader’s tendency to overlook the book’s most important lacuna: Carretta’s refusal to judge the literary achievement of his subject, who—whatever his entrepreneurial skill—is best known as a biographer. Carretta’s search for a “biographical truth” oddly avoids judging the self-knowledge informing Equiano’s own account. This omission largely explains Equiano, the African’s otherwise inexplicable neglect of those postcolonial critical perspectives, linking Equiano’s racial politics to his literary expression. In an interpretation that treats Equiano‘s literary production as antislavery rhetoric or commodity, Carretta, perhaps predictably, does not explore the (inevitably racial) self-understanding of a black author in the colonial world.

Carretta’s Equiano inhabits a world of opportunity that promotes his development as a particular kind of black eighteenth-century self-made man. As such an entrepreneur, the African makes his way through the Anglo–Atlantic world as what Ira Berlin calls an Atlantic Creole.¹ Equiano may not be an African born abroad (although the book powerfully suggests this is so), but he succeeds as one of what Berlin describes as those shrewd colored intercultural go-betweens at home throughout the Atlantic basin worlds of the West Indies, North America, England, and Africa. Such individuals, according to Berlin, often thrived economically—as Equiano thrived—as managers, entrepreneurs, translators, managers, settlers, or missionaries. Like Equiano, they often achieved success in finding English or American patronage, making money, and marrying into an Anglo–European family.

Carretta draws upon this paradigm to place Equiano in a sphere of interracial opportunity that could plausibly promote the African’s self-cultivation. In these economic, religious, and seagoing worlds, superfi-cially free of racial boundaries, Equiano was able to acquire not only religion but also useful trades, business skills, literary expertise, and fi-nally the trans-British network of antislavery activists among whom he marketed his book. This reading of Equiano’s life illuminates the other black lives explored elsewhere by Carretta, such as those of Phillis Wheatley, Gronniosaw, and Ignatius Sancho—all remarkably literate, well-connected, geographically mobile blacks who moved throughout the Atlantic world in the middle and late eighteenth century. In the context of Carretta’s remarkable work, these black Afro–British figures emerge as the natural antecedents to nineteenth-century American abolitionist blacks—Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown—who similarly thrived in the emerging capitalist world. Indeed, African American writers, with the exception of Wheatley, would not emerge until the mid nineteenth century. Only the post-1829 immediatist antislavery movement would provide an opportunity to black American intellectuals similar to the eighteenth-century English world that nurtured Equiano.

Carretta’s perspective on Equiano...