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American Literature 75.2 (2003) 427-429



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"Genius in Bondage": Literature of the Early Black Atlantic. Ed. Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould. Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky. 2001. 272 pp. $34.95.

Ignatius Sancho characterized Phillis Wheatley's poems as evidence of "genius in bondage." While Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould do not directly query the fundamental ambivalence of this phrase in their title, the following questions are implicit in the volume's essays: Does the Anglophone writing of the early black Atlantic transcend or reiterate the constraints placed on its production? Is black writing itself the genius that defies normal talent? Or is black writing fatally compromised by bondage, mediated by white amanuenses and racial discourses, economic hardship and skeptical readership, leading to the juxtaposition that John Sekora characterized as "black message/white envelope"? Rather than expressing hope for unfettered genius, the thirteen essays in this volume speak to the discovery of subtler forms of bondage and subversion. From Briton Hammon's 1760 captivity narrative to Nathaniel Paul's 1827 emancipationist sermon, categories of race, gender, religion, language, and economics complicate the archive of early black writing. In "Genius in Bondage," historical contextualizations joust with literary readings, and "American" concerns are challenged by "Atlantic" paradigms.

The first section features four essays on race and gender, ranging from Roxann Wheeler's deductive analysis of Ottobah Cugoano's self-inscription within competing eighteenth-century universalist race theories to Gillian Whitlock's compelling account of identity formation through relationships of adjacency to addressees, interlocutors, and editors in Mary Prince's dictated life story. Felicity Nussbaum uncovers the negative basis of black manhood in Equiano's autobiography and Sancho's letters, whereas Karen Weyler reveals generic overlaps between English accounts of Indian captivity and slave narratives by Briton Hammon and John Marrant. The essays' different structural approaches thus range from the necessary (Wheeler) to the contingent (Whitlock) and from gendering (Nussbaum) to generic (Weyler).

The second section maps the interactions of property and identity. While most of the essays are author-centered, Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson develop a wider sociological scope by examining previously unpublished [End Page 427] letters between British slave traders and their African counterparts in Old Calabar. While perhaps hasty in its dismissal of the literary value of these Creole English materials, the essay reveals how British slave traders extracted payment, in the form of slaves, for the industrial wares they supplied the local elites, even as some elite children were sent to be educated in Liverpool while other relatives and associates were kept in pawn, on ship. A disguised ekpe (leopard) fraternity regulated the traffic, keeping records in secret script. The exchange of letters between Calabar and Britain reveals a fascinating convergence of lines of credit, labor substitution, currency forms, hostage taking, cryptography, and cultural misapprehension and translation amidst transnational alliance and exploitation. The implications are worthy of a book. In his essay, Philip Gould demonstrates that the Jeffersonian definition of "the mixt character of persons and property" can explain the compromised nature of black speech and mimicry alongside the idealism of the political promises of Enlightenment liberalism. For Gould, John Marrant and Venture Smith are not so much uncomplicated victims of their white amanuenses as active collaborators for understandable reasons. Vincent Carretta's essay on Equiano makes a powerful case for a "recognition of his place in the history of the book [which] is overdue" (144). Carretta masters the details of Equiano's profit margins through his self-promotion and progressive self-publication of the autobiography. Equiano's use of declining techniques, such as individual subscription, and emerging ones, such as lecture tours, speaks to his commercially innovative self-proprietorship.

The third section, featuring six essays on language and difference, is largely Americanist in its focus (with Markman Ellis's essay on Sancho's imitation of Laurence Sterne the sole exception). Ellis's essay is a remarkable exercise that converts received notions of Sancho's obsequious conservatism into a reading of his scandalous and subversive sentimentalism. Ellis interprets Sancho's letters as culturally combative expressions of...

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