Teaching Olaudah Equiano’s Narrative: Pedagogical Strategies and New Perspectives

Loving the Unstable Text and Times of Equiano’s Narrative: Using Carretta’s Biography in the Classroom

Loving the Unstable Text and Times of Equiano’s Narrative: Using Carretta’s Biography in the Classroom Emily M. N. Kugler When it came out, vincent Carretta’s Equiano, the African: Biography of a SelfMade Man prompted news reports attempting to make sense of an academic controversy for non-academic readers. headlines such as the Guardian’s “Author casts shadow over slave hero” (younge) or theWashington Times’s “New biography challenges iconic slave’s account” (Manning) create the idea that Carretta’s biography constitutes a possible delegitimization of Olaudah Equiano and his Narrative , regardless of whatever nuances are included in the articles themselves. in a good representation of this trend, U.S. News and World Report writer Nell Boyce presents Carretta’s book as an attack on the legitimacy of teaching Equiano’s Narrative in the university: Equiano’s narrative has become a staple of African-American literature and history, one that professors routinely rely on to convey the pain of slavery to their students. But now a University of Maryland English professor has turned up evidence that Equiano may not have endured the middle passage —indeed, he may not have set foot in Africa. his likely birthplace? South Carolina. (Boyce) The ominous “but” implies an end to the use of the Narrative in the classroom and points to a central question in teaching Equiano’s work. Are we merely teaching his autobiography in order “to convey the pain of slavery”? Some of our students might assume the answer is yes, and their assumption would be supported by the way they have likely encountered the text. frequently, 120 Emily M. N. Kugler the Narrative is included in anthologies of world, U.S., and British literature, but just as frequently, the excerpts in these publications focus on the opening chapters dealing with Africa and the Middle Passage. i believe this is a dangerous truncation of the work. in its similarity to the eighteenth-century stereotype that women authors could only write from experience and lacked the masculine power of a creative imagination, this simplification of the Narrative presents the danger of sending students the message that its author only has value as a witness and as an African victim of the slave trade. Becoming like the famous figure on the Wedgwood “Am i Not A Man and a Brother?” medallion, he represents a larger issue of slavery, rather than being treated as an author of a complicated work and an equal to other figures of that era. yet Equiano, even in his own account, hardly lived the life of a typical slave. his actual enslavement takes up less than half of the Narrative. rather than give only an account of his enslavement, Equiano provides a story that focuses as much if not more on the transformations that occur after his emancipation. The Narrative is concerned largely with the creation of an identity that would provide for its narrator a sense of agency, security, and community—all of which he finds in England. To bring out the richness and scope of the Narrative, students need to learn the historical context of the text. for this purpose, Carretta’s biography (even in excerpts) is an effective pedagogical tool for transforming students’ experience with the Narrative. Through this text, students can better appreciate Equiano as a skilled eighteenth-century author whose work illustrates the ambiguities of the slavery debate in context of multiple articulations of British identity. This approach introduces students to the complexities of the era as well as to the discussions in the fields of literary and historical studies today. Equiano as Author: The Aesthetics of Eighteenth-Century British Politics The most pedagogically useful aspect of Carretta’s Equiano is his treatment of the author as a talented writer capable of creating a narrative that was both politically and financially successful. in my classes, i try to emphasize the contradictory and unstable presentation of slavery and identity both as a means for discussing the artistic complexity of the piece as well as to link the text to the multiple debates surrounding slavery at the close of the eighteenth century. Carretta’s Equiano provides a useful model for reexamining the opening chapters (so often the only loving the Unstable Text and Times of Equiano’s Narrative 121 part included in anthologies) as the work of a gifted author, which fits with my approach to the text. Carretta presents Equiano as embodying...