The "Slave" as Cultural Artifact: The Case of Mary Prince

The History of Mary Prince was first published in 1831 in London and Edinburgh and ran to three editions that year as its popularity proved integral to the success of the Emancipation Bill. It remains a much discussed text that frequently appears on courses that deal with transatlantic slavery and abolition. So much rests on this slim volume because it is the only text that recounts, in a first-person narrative, the experiences of an enslaved woman female slave in the British Caribbean. Despite its importance to the moment of Emancipation, in the Preface to the first edition, Thomas Pringle, then secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society, goes to lengths to emphasize that Prince's narrative is her own story, published at her request: "[T]he Anti Slavery Society have no concern whatever with this publication, nor are they in any degree responsible for the statements it contains. I have published the tract, not as their Secretary, but in my private capacity; and any profits that may arise from the sale will be exclusively appropriated to the benefit of Mary Prince herself."¹ From the beginning, then, there has been an explicit tension between Mary Prince "herself" and her own motivations to tell her story, and the needs of the broader antislavery movement and its history. This tension between Prince and her contexts is ongoing as she continues to serve as a representative figure for the history of British abolition. In this essay I want to examine some of the ways in which Mary Prince and her text have been commemorated in Britain, the Caribbean, and the United States, especially since Abolition 200 which commemorated the passing of the Abolition Bill in British Parliament in 1807, banning the trade in slaves.² These public and digital commemorations of Prince interact with the archives of slavery in ways that highlight significant problems with remembering slavery in the multimedia age on both sides of the Atlantic. Moreover, as I shall show, both the public and digital commemorations of Prince create new archives of slavery that rewrite not only historical fact but Prince's History itself. Not much attention was given to Prince outside of academic arenas prior to 2007. Since then, however, the politics of commemoration in the context of present-day abolitionism have worked to recreate and represent Prince as a much more popular and public figure in ways that pander to our current concerns. Her brief text, that was already the product of complex historical forces through which Prince attempted to speak, becomes, once again, subjected to the demands of cultural politics that threaten to overwhelm what The History might have to tell us. As in the 1830s, post–2007, Prince has been reconstituted as a cultural artifact for the present but is presented to us in ways that obscure her presentation in the present as an artifact. The cultural desire to access the "real" Mary Prince as a historical subject occludes the forces at work to fulfill this mode of consumption within antislavery commemoration to the neglect of what we really do or can know about Prince.

Before looking at these commemorations it is worth recounting the context of the production of The History and some of the key critical debates that it generates in scholarship today. Prince's narrative was transcribed by Susanna Strickland, later Susanna Moodie, who was to write Roughing it in the Bush (1852), while she was a servant in the household of Thomas Pringle, secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society. Prince was technically still enslaved but had left her owners, the Woods, in order to test Lord Mansfield's decision of 1772 on the James Somerset case which had fudged the issue of slave status in England by stating that "The state of slavery is of such a nature, that it is incapable of being now introduced by justice upon mere reasoning … it must take its rise from positive law."³ This had left uncertain the issue of the rights of slave owners in a post-revolutionary culture. In 1829, under the direction of the Anti-Slavery society...