Approaches to Teaching Behn’s Oroonoko ed. by Cynthia Richards and Mary Ann O’Donnell (review)

Approaches to Teaching Behn’s Oroonoko is a timely contribution to the MLA Approaches to Teaching World Literature series because, as the preface argues, Oroonoko holds a pivotal place in the canon as a text that teachers can approach as a trans-Atlantic novel (xi), as a work by the first Englishwoman professional writer (xiii), through the intersectionality of class, race, and gender (xiii), and as an early novel of travel (xiv). Approaches is divided into two parts. A short introductory Part 1, “Materials,” provides the reader with useful information about editions and additional resources, both in print and online. The more extensive Part 2, “Approaches,” includes twenty-seven short essays, grouped in five context areas. Like other books in the series, Approaches to Teaching Behn’s Oroonoko uses an anecdotal and conversational approach rather than a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning approach. As a result, it feels more like hearing about teachers’ experiences rather than reading quantitative information about student learning.

Of greatest interest to feminist teachers will be six essays that focus on the alterity of the past and complicate and historicize race, class, gender, bodies, and slavery. As Ana de Frietas Boe notes, “students do not always recognize the alterity of the past,” so it’s vital to help them understand that “ideas can be historically specific” (107). The most helpful of these essays, Leslie Richardson’s “Teaching Oronooko at a Historically Black University” uses John Locke’s concept of “property in his own person” to historicize the intersectionality of race and gender, and to show how race-based slavery practices and marriage law produced raced and gendered bodies without access to the right to control their self, labor, or property (125). In answer to “why teach the British eighteenth century at an HBCU?” Richardson argues that “the assumptions and ideals we take for granted were under construction at this time,” and while contradictory, the “Englightenment . . . bequeathed us the language to appraise the world we live in today” (130).

Three essays show how teachers can historicize racism and race-based slavery practices. Vincent Carretta’s “Representations of Race, Status, and Slavery in Behn’s Oroonoko and Equiano’s Interesting Narrative” uses Olaudah Equiano’s biography (published in 1789) alongside Oroonoko to show how concepts of who could be enslaved by western Europeans and colonists in the Americas changed throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, along with the changing practices of how and why slaves were obtained and traded. Derek Hughes’s “Oroonoko and Blackness” suggests that students “should not assume that the racial injustices of the seventeenth century were driven by the prejudices and theories of the nineteenth” (58) and reports that he teaches Oroonoko in the context of multiple other early modern texts about race to help students historicize what race means then and now. Finally, Thomas W. Krise’s “Oroonoko as a Caribbean Text” reminds the reader that the most valuable American colonies for European powers were the Caribbean colonies that produced sugar (94). Krise explains that in his class “Oroonoko raised questions about the form and nature of the new commercial and territorial empire that England was building” and should remind readers of “the complex social forces at work in the period of European expansion” (98). Thus, by focusing on Oroonoko in Caribbean contexts, US teachers show how Caribbean slavery and trading practices differed from those in the northern American colonies.

Feminist teachers will also find two essays on how to teach historical bodies in Oroonoko helpful. Boe’s essay, “Teaching Oroonoko in a Literature Survey 1 Course,” suggests using sonnets to illustrate concepts of beauty in early modern contexts as a way of teaching how bodies are read in Oroonoko. This strategy should help instructors of early British surveys teach the racialization of sonnets as well as Oronooko. In a rather different approach, Roberta C. Martin’s “The Early Modern Body in Behn’s Poetry and Oroonoko” describes...