Equiano study notes and discussion ideas:

Many of the following ideas are drawn from the recent Early American Literature essay “No Change Without Purchase: Olaudah Equiano and the Economies of Self and Market,” printed in volume 40, number 3. The author is Ross Pudaloff.

We assume today that the ideals of revolution and commerce are mutually exclusive, however, as J. G. A. Pocock has argued, “denunciations of commerce as founded on soullessly rational calculation and the cold mechanical philosophy of Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, and Newton” only began to appear, as Ross Pudaloff writes, “around 1789, the year in which . . . Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography first appeared” (Pudaloff 500).

John Brewer has pointed out plainly that “[T]he link between radical politics and commercialization, forged by voluntary associations, could hardly have been stronger” (qtd. in Pudaloff 500).

Paine was among many radical who believed that “exchange and commodification could produce a subject where none had heretofore existed” (Pudaloff 500).

Equiano’s autobiography demonstrates the “radical act of producing new public identity”; Equiano’s resistance and identity “arise from [his] capacity to speak and write the language of the dominant culture, to differentiate among the discourses available, and to appear as a speaker who can be acquiescent and resistant simultaneously” (501).

Pudaloff reads Equiano’s autobiography as an “exemplary instance of resistance and self-creation through his entry into exchange” (501). He celebrates commerce and exchange even as he has suffered as a result of being their object.

In class we discussed the conventions that Equiano uses to tell his story and the strategies he uses to narrate his progressive descent into the darkness that is the slave trade and his existence as a slave.

What kind of picture does he present of his home village? What role does his mother serve? What are we to make of his mention of the fact that his family owned many slaves? How might this have resonated with a white audience? In light of Pudaloff’s ideas above, how does this detail function to include Equiano and his family into the commercial culture of the eighteenth century?

We discussed briefly the inclusion of Equiano in an anthology of American literature. The introduction to his autobiography in the Norton reveals that Equiano purchased his freedom from his owner, Robert King, in 1766, and once he gained his “freedom by paying forty pounds . . . he never set foot on American soil again” (350). His narrative was published in London in 1789 and was reprinted in America in 1791. Why do we conceive of Equiano as an American author? What do we learn about the construction of an “American self” from Equiano’s autobiography?

Looking forward to Apess, please think about the rhetorical device that both Equiano and Apess use to identify the hypocrisy of the Christians who oppress them. Equiano writes, “O, ye nominal Christians! Might not an African ask you—Learned you this from your God, who says unto you, Do unto all me n as you would men should do unto you? Is it not enough that we are torn from our country and friends, to toil for your luxury and lust of gain? Must every tender feeling be likewise sacrificed to your avarice?” (360). Equiano relies here upon the significance of biblical references. Equiano’s objective is to convince Europeans and Americans of the indisputable humanity of Africans and, not only that, of the clarity of the dictates of Christianity in regard to equality of treatment of all men. Please examine Equiano’s accusation of Christians in the above passage. From what does this passage gain its greatest strength?