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

Equiano and One Canon of Early African American Literature

Equiano and One Canon of Early African American Literature Phillip M. Richards The critically informed university teacher of Olaudah Equiano’s Narrative faces or will face what is the deepest and most threatening impasse today in the field of literary studies. On the one hand, the black studies movement of the 1960s generated a set of influential critical paradigms that stressed the adversarial relationship of the Anglo-American black literary canon to a broader Western cultural continuity. This new canon adumbrated in works by critics such as houston A. Baker Jr. and henry louis Gates Jr. sought to sustain a disciplinary tradition of black texts largely through linguistic continuities such as the “Blues vernacular” or “Signify(ing).” Another tradition of historically oriented literary critics, found in the work of such scholars as James Walvin, Paul Edwards, James levernier, Mukhtar Ali isani, David Grimsted, Christine levecq, Charles Scruggs, Joanna Brooks, John C. Shields, vincent Carretta, Philip Gould, Michael Drexler, and Ed White, among others, have pursued rigorous biographical, textual, intellectual, and comparative studies firmly grounding the origins of Anglo-African writers such as Equiano and Phillis Wheatley in Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment traditions. More and more, it appears that Equiano and Wheatley surface at a crucial moment in which British and continental writers’ texts begin to engage in a critique of the Enlightenment as these authors (and the readers of these texts) become aware of the perspectives of non-Western cultures, the emergence of middlewomen and middlemen of color who act as go-betweens in an increasingly fluid Atlantic World, and when the development of subjectivity becomes a crucial issue within the Western literary tradition. in his Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education, Gerald Graff has incisively argued to instruct our students 172 Phillip M. richards in the ideological conflicts of contemporary literary critics. And in the case of Equiano, such instruction guides us to engage our students in the most profound questions raised by the black studies and multicultural movements. Do we discern in our growing awareness of black writers a separate literary continuity and consciousness, or are these writers and their texts simply one more involution in a broader, more expansive historical narrative of Western political discourse? if the second point holds true, then we owe it to our students to ground the canon of early black texts as rigorously as we can in the literary and cultural histories of the Enlightenment, romantic, and post-romantic periods. We must do so with a certain sang froid in regard to how this inquiry will validate or undermine the recently constructed oppositional, adversarial discourses of black studies and multiculturalism. for these “black” texts may simply be one more twisting and turning discourse in a larger tradition of non-Western appropriation of an essentially Western consciousness. The best starting place for this inquiry may be an examination of the Enlightenment process of “reading” and the conception of a “public sphere.” literature courses inevitably create canons, which in turn have their own aesthetics . At the heart of contemporary, American college courses in literature—no matter how self-consciously avant-garde—remain now-traditional assumptions about the text, its relation to the reader, and reading habits themselves. Since the eighteenth century, critics in the Anglo-American tradition have casually assumed an aesthetic defining the interaction between the artistic object, the reader, and the fancy or imagination, and later on as a Coleridgean secondary imagination or transcendentalist higher reason. Even deconstructive and semiotic critics ground their initial linguistic manipulations with understandings of the text produced by what M. h. Abrams has called “disinterested” “contemplation” and reflection (Abrams 135). This aesthetic emerges from the capacity of the literary object to impinge upon and engage the subjectivity of each teacher and student. romantic notions of creative imagination—in Coleridge’s terms, the secondary imagination —often describe the engaged subjectivity’s creation of a “secondary” world of art: a process of creation, comprehension, and re-creation that extends an individual literary text into a tradition. from this perspective, the artistic observer reads the text as an inclusive entity , or, in romantic terms, an organic sphere of personae, conventions, idioms, imagery, symbols, and metaphors that constitute a distinctive world for the con- Equiano and One Canon of African American literature 173 templation of the viewer. The artist who created paintings, fiction, and poetry had chosen and pursued a distinctive vocation in...