Humanities Core Course

Forms of Association

Professor Haynes

Winter Quarter, Week IV

Nation, Empire and Identity:

Equiano, Humanizing Africans and Recasting Identity in the Atlantic World

I. Remaking the Atlantic World through African Slavery

A. Capturing the Meaning of Slavery and Abolition

1. Complex economic system linking three continents depended on millions of individual calculations based on the exploitation of African people

2. Slave narratives formed part of the strategy to abolish the slave trade and slavery in the 1780s through clarifying the consequences of European action and inaction

3. Equiano seeks to unmask a system of organized brutality and retain his credibility as a reliable informant but also induce individuals who benefit indirectly and directly to join other abolitionists to end the trade and the condition of slavery

B. Equiano’s Humanizing Narrative: The Use and Abuse of European Power

1. Narrates the making of his personhood while exposing the lineaments of causality

2. Insists on human equality, but uses comparison to distinguish advanced state of European society (see passage on p. 46)

3. Slave trade and slavery an example and a moral test of whether Europe will use its advantage to exploit Africans or contribute to their civilizational development

C. Making a Slave: Physical and Psychological Violence

1. Uses ethnographic discussion to define and locate Africa and Africans as traditional nation, i.e. family, language, territorial boundaries, laws, etc. (see pp. 34-38)

2. Describes his encounter and discovery of African slave trade and the institution of slavery in British America (pp. 53-54) [Illustration of captured African boys , Illustration of Testing Slaves for Sickness]

3. Deploys sensory experience of violence and terror to reconstruction process of dehumanizing Africans during passage and arrival to Barbadoes (pp. 54-57) [Brookes Ship Diagram 1 and 2 and Illustration of Slave Dance from http://africanhistory.about.com/od/slaveryimages/ig/Slavery-Images-Gallery/index.htm & George Moreland, Execrable Human Traffick from http://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/d/228/]

D. Forging an Identity through Slavery: Gustavus Vasa, Christian Sailor

1. sense of identity and possibility derived from experience at sea; living in close proximity and in a split culture above and below the decks; and experience England (pp. 61-62, 63-64) [Display Image: William Hogarth’s Portrait of Captain Lord George, 1742 (http://www.nmm.ac.uk/collections/explore/object.cfm?ID=BHC2720)]

2. matures from a boy to a young man during the Seven Years War (1756-1763) (pp. 65 and 71): ‘almost an Englishman’.

3. expectation to freedom based on service, baptism and war-time duty shattered (p. 84): kidnapped again

4. acutely conscious of structure of exploitation of slavery that provides few alternatives to acceptance.