One of the things that this text and the two readings which go with it reminded me is that authors of historical texts themselves had agendas, nor did they write them for future historians, facts which remind us that we should not take texts at face value. I think many of us who have read the primary sources for different courses or research projects can confess that there were times when we found ourselves reading a text and almost unconsciously taking the information in that particular text as an objective reflection of a past reality that we can learn from and/or use to support a particular argument. Carretta’s opinion is that Vassa had a vested interest in resurrecting, or perhaps even creating, an African identity for himself as Equiano in order to make his account authentic and give it power in the public sphere.
This particular issue is quite important, since naively accepting the objectivity of a primary source can create a whole misguided discourse. This is particularly salient for the historiographical turn in Yuan and Ming Dynasty Chinese history. The authors of the Ming dynastic history and its predecessor, the Veritable Records of the Ming had particular agendas. The legitimacy of a dynasty and indeed that of the succeeding dynasty to their Han subjects, depended largely on rhetorical and ideological adherence to the Confucian canon and its related discourse on rulership. The legitimacy of the Ming was very vocally, and strategically, based on the defeat of the previous Mongol dynasty and the revival of orthodox Confucian rule. Though pronouncements of the dynasty played to this idea, much of the government, military, geopolitical strategy and even culture was influenced by Mongol patterns established in Inner Asia and during the Yuan. However, the official historical records were often sanitized of these elements and written to reflect Confucian orthodoxy. Previously, this led many scholars solely using those records to write histories that described the Ming as a dyed in the wool Chinese dynasty that reversed what the Mongols had done, reviving Han culture and bearing little continuity with the Mongols. Current historiography has been exceedingly critical of this trend and made much progress in revising it. Interestingly enough, many scholars still support a very uncontextualized view of the official histories and maintain their accuracy and objectivity. I often wonder if this is irresponsibility, ignorance, or simply another perspective they feel overrides the new.
This brings to mind another particular dilemma faced by historians: whether or not the difficulty in verifying contents should make us more strategic in the use of particular texts. In this I mean the use of a text with which we know we cannot contextualize with other texts very well. I am reminded from my own field of the case of the Orkhon inscriptions which provide perhaps the only example of Old Turkic and the account of a Khan establish the Turkic Empire from the standpoint of the Turks. However, much of the inscriptions are fragmentary, the stele being damaged, and many parts have been inferred. Although no one would discount the importance of having deciphered these inscriptions, it is hard to determine what is fact from epic fiction, since this stele most likely had a political significance for the Turkic polity (providing support for the regime or some other unifying or power projecting function). How much can one rely on such texts to recreate past events? To what extent do other texts enable us to interpret this, since records are sporadic in other languages as well. A further interesting dilemma is that if there are other texts which do help us understand a particular text, how appropriate are they? Do they bring us closer to an understanding of the text? Or, is there such a gulf that separates the texts that the historian has to go to herculean efforts to bridge the two? If so, how valuable is an analysis that comes out of this? Returning to the question of the Orkhon inscriptions, there are Chinese records which do record and recount the rise of that particular Khan and his empire, but from a very Sinocentric position. Details, description and causation is wholly divorced from the methods and seeming objectives of the inscriptions. Much detail itself is questionable and highly moralized, since the Turks were seen as barbarians. This leaves the historian in the difficult position of the arbitrator of truth. Who is right? Which story is faithful to what happened? Overuse of Chinese texts has been seen as an ideological and cultural standpoint/decision. If we use other texts to contextualize then, how much is this an ideological decision?
This week’s readings brought me to reflect more deeply on the use of interviews in writing history. Gustavus Vassa/Olaudah Equinao’s Narrative demonstrates the way that memory is imperfect and autobiographical stories can have a purpose. As I read I found myself reflecting: Does it matter whether Equiano was born in Africa or in South Carolina? Does it matter whether he writes about his own personal memories or draws upon the memories of another? Regardless of its veracity, a story can still move readers and invoke sympathy. If Euqiano’s goal was to move his readers to reject slavery, did his narrative not compel his readers in this direction? Equiano’s claim to authenticity makes his autobiography seem more trustworthy, which no doubt makes his position against slavery more convincing, but perhaps all that matters is that his story is convincing and true generally, if not personally. Caretta points out that “the discrepancy between the ages and dates Vassa records…may be due simply to a confused memory of childhood events…or [it] may have been rhetorically motivated” (103. No doubt the construction of his entire autobiography was rhetorically motivated. But is it problematic if his account is based on oral history and reading, rather than personal experience? I think Boulukos is right in moving beyond the discussion of Equiano’s date of birth to a discussion about his purpose for writing and the uniqueness of his position in the slave trade debate of his time.
Looking at Equiano’s Narrative as a primary source document, I can’t help but think of the importance of a multifaceted approach to constructing the past – corroboration, historical empathy, understanding context. I find myself imagining the use of interviews in my research and realizing their significance, both on the level of what happened, and on the level of how that person thinks/feels about what happened.
I had a similar response as Kate to these readings. Caretta’s focus on the temporal plausibility of the narrative given by Equiano/Vassa seems to be totally besides the point. Not only do I care very little as to whether or not he was actually born in Africa, or when he may have travelled to England (and Caretta’s narrative seems to be just as or more speculative as Equiano’s), but also Caretta is relying on a problematic system of authentication, stating that “Cugoano and his friend published their works without any of the authenticating documentation or mediation by white authorities that prefaces the works of Phillis Wheatley or Ignatius Sancho and other black writers to reassure readers that the claim of authorship is valid and to imply that their words have been supervised before publication.” (p.98) While he makes a point that other authors (Wheatley and Sancho) writing similar accounts did go through this step, he fails to acknowledge the power structures evident in the process, and does not consider for a moment the possibility that Equiano/Vassa was intentionally not pursuing this avenue of recognition. Further, his analyses seems to be ironically ahistorical, as if he expects a historical figure to act with precise continuity throughout their lifetime, and not change themselves or their stories in any meaningful way.
It does raise a pertinent question though, which I think Boulukos does a good job of addressing: how can we read agency into underrepresented historical actors? One way is through historical context, which Boulukos argues very convincingly that Equiano/Vassa was writing in conversation with his contemporaries in the British debate about slavery. Another is to acknowledge that historical actors change over time and exist as we do from moment to moment, rather than in some kind of clear continuity easily represented in the historical record.
I came across several accounts from the Pacific Northwest in the early 1800s this summer, all of which, written by ‘non-authorial’ voices – Fur Traders, Frontier women, sailors – and all made similar claims to the truthfulness of their accounts. So I wonder if this is more a function of the genre of ‘accounts from abroad’ during the 18th and 19th centuries than a real honest to goodness truth claim?
There is also an interesting recent Radiolab episode about memory, which punctures our conceptions of accuracy of memory. This idea of memory as a neural event and physical reaction is much more widely accepted now than in ’98 when Caretta was writing. Caretta seems to be arguing that Equiano/Vassa really had a ‘great’ memory, so why would he mess up some of these early dates? But we know that memory is not such a cut and dry phenomenon. This is but one example… http://www.radiolab.org/story/91569-memory-and-forgetting/
This week’s reading on Equiano appears quite interesting because even though it is kind of “common knowledge” of the cruelty of slavery and everyone should be able to guess about the contents of this book, it still gives me some new understanding of slavery and things related to it.
For example, at the beginning, the author spent a lot of efforts portraying his first “home country”: Africa, Essaka. Even though from Caretta’s article we know that there is a question about his identity as being born in Africa, we can see that he tried to portray his home town as being simple, happy, sophisticated both socially, culturally and even religiously. Also, as I was reading that part, I was surprised to see his effort of linking his own hometown people with Jews: “I cannot forebear suggesting what has long struck me very forcibly, namely the strong analogy which even by this sketch, imperfect as it is, appears to prevail in the manners and customs of my countrymen and those of the Jews” (21). He tried to argue that even though the life of his country men are simple(even primitive), they were “like the Israelites in their primitive state”; thus, placing his race as no inferior to any other races, even to the most noble and honorable race of Christianity.
The two supplementary readings are very much in conversation with this little introduction. Caretta focuses her research mainly on the identity of the author Euqiano, arguing that since other information he provided through his voyages were incredibly accurate, the contradictory facts about his origin must indicated that “Vassa manipulated some of the facts in his autobiography” (9). Boulukos, even though very much agreed with Caretta about her discovery, was not really interested in the real identity of Euquiano. He argued that whether he was born in Africa or not was not important, and what really mattered was that he was actually in conversation with the large slavery debate during that time, using his autobiography. Therefore, it would be understandable that he would try to link his race with Jews, just in order to show that they were not inferior in nature(to debate with those pro-slavery authors and also to provide new understandings for those anti-slavery authors).
Also, being a very pious Christian(if the account is accurate) himself, I have the sense of the author trying to link true Christianity, humane characteristics and even his own identity, with England. Throughout the narrative, the author often used a very sarcastic tone to refer to those brutal slave traders as those “Christian” masters, along with their unlawful, brutal and bloodthirsty characteristics, indicating that those people away from England were not true Christians, or even noble human beings. However, with everything positive he would relate with England(except sometimes he also showed his fond of the Turks): “he[brutal “Christian” master] was just proceeding to strike me, when fortunately a British seaman on board, whose heart had not been debauched by a West India climate, interposed and prevented him” (68). Thus, as I was reading it, I thought he was very fond of Englishmen, culture and the identity, which kind of surprised me because if he was kidnapped and forced to went through all of that, he would resent Englishmen. Boulukos’ article answers my question: “A claim of English identity by a Black colonial remind Equiano’s readers of the contradictions between slavery, racial oppression, and ‘English liberty'”; and in Equiano’s mind, “English liberty” should be “applied consistently to all people” (8, 10)
Moreover, there is another thing strikes my interest. As the author, later settled down in Britain for a while, “I[He] soon found [his money] would not be sufficient to….my[his] own necessary expenses….I[He] thought it best, therefore, to try the sea again in quest of more money, as I[he] had been bred to it” (110). It was quite interesting for me to find that Equiano(or some black people) who ought to be the victims of the slave trades and also the whole process of colonization and expansion, also benefited themselves using the same method. Moreover, as he wrote later: “thus I went on till May 1773, when I was roused by the sound of fame, to seek new adventures, and to find, towards the north pole, what our Creator never intended we should, a passage to India” (114). Now even his motivations sounds very much similar to white people, which appears very interesting to me.
In short, this week’s reading, supplied with two articles on the identity of the author and context of his time, opens new ground for us to re-examine the slave trade and new identities and influences it might influenced Equiano and his countrymen.
One of the things that the Equiano/Vassa readings had me thinking about is how we deal with primary sources which are otherwise phenomenal historical documents except for the fact that they lie. On the one hand, a first person account from a 18th-century slave’s perspective is something you would want to use as a historian of slavery. Assuming for the sake of argument that the bit regarding life in Africa was fabricated, however, how can his book actually serve as historical evidence?
Carretta’s method is to corroborate what Equiano/Vassa says with outside sources, believing in what corroborates and disbelieving in what doesn’t. In the case of the former, he assumes that justification arises out of the coherence of the different sources (see pg. 100 for example). But how can a source play any part in supporting justification if it isn’t itself justified? I think the normal answer here would be along the lines of “well he had no motive to lie, was in a position to know the truth,” etc., basically that he is a reliable narrator. But if we say that any part of the book is evidence because Equiano/Vassa is a factually reliable narrator, then proof of his unreliability would seem to remove the grounds of justification, not just for those parts where he lies, but seemingly for the entire book. At that point, why should we care if two sources corroborate, since we know that at least one of them has no epistemic value. We seem to be caught in this conundrum where a problem in one part of the source seems to shit on the whole thing.
So, if my characterization of this problem is correct (open question, I think), what do historians do with a text like this? Do we face a dilemma between saying that either a claim has at least some degree of justification just by virtue of someone (in this case Equiano/Vassa) making it, or that we can’t actually use Equiano/Vassa as evidence of things that happened? Can we see his reliability as a narrator in a contextual way, i.e. isolate those areas where he is reliable from those where he isn’t? Clearly these are bigger issues, but Equiano/Vassa seems to me like a good case study of them. There’s also the issue of looking through the text versus looking at it, and none of this is to say that the book couldn’t be used by a literary-turnist, for example, but that’s another topic of discussion.
This week’s readings again raises the theme of textuality and “deconstructing” the text that we have been exploring in this course. Boulukos sees imbedded in the text a clever and calculated response to the common parameters of the pro-slavery/anti-slavery debate in England at the time, and I find this line of argument quite convincing (this is not to say I dismiss the possibility that Equiano was in fact born in Africa).
This raises the question, if Equiano was crafting the text with a political agenda, and the attitudes and mentalities of his audience in mind, do modern historians not to the same thing? For example: a scholar writes an account of Guyana’s former president Forbes Burnham (1923-85). It’s considered a good or even “classic” piece of scholarship, meticulously footnoted, it can be found in most university libraries, etc. The book discusses Burnham’s expansion of military spending by 500% in 3 years (true story) but doesn’t discuss, say, Burnham’s efforts to introduce potato farming in the Pakaraima mountains as an additional source of revenue and food security for the remote indigenous communities there. The lengthy exploration of the former and the omittance of the later potentially present the reader with two very different Burnhams. Of course, being selective with facts is different than making something up – but it still represents an intentionally constructed narrative containing the biases, assumptions, and yes possibly even an “agenda” of the author.
Another interesting subject the Equiano text raises is that of modern myths and legends themselves, their role in society and politics and how we engage with them as historians. For a while now I have been thinking about this in relation to Guyana, and understanding Guyanese history; how there are these common tales and anecdotes you here time and time again in Guyana – on the street, in a bar, around a dinner table – about the president, or the former president, or the leader of the opposition (e.g. “the president practises obeah (“witchcraft”) and he goes to a black woman on the east bank every Sunday to be bathed in mud”) – that have no empirical evidence whatsoever to support them, yet a great number ardently believe, and will defend their conviction with a phrase like: “It’s a known thing” (someone with a more analytical brain than I could have a great time deconstructing that phrase in itself). To me what is interesting here is where these myths come from, what purpose do they serve, what do they tell us about society and how ordinary people make sense of their world, engage with established authorities of information (e.g. mainstream news, government), what interests and agendas do they serve, etc. I should also add I am not implying this is unique to developing societies or anything like that – for example, right there are apparently a lot of Canadians that think Muslim women are receiving citizenship without ever having to prove their identity by showing their face – this of course, is a myth.
Like Kate and Tyler I also had to think about the importance of Equiano’s/Vassa’s place of birth. I came to the conclusion that it depends on the question we address to the text (for what we make it a source): For example for a research about trade in the Carribean it is quite non-relevant if Equiano/Vassa was born in Africa or not.
But if we want to analyse the big complex of slavery, colonialism and racism, it depends on the specific question and on the specific part of Equiano’s/Vassa’s text we want to analyse. I personally think that this book can give useful hints about everyday-life racism in the 18th century and those chapters are not contested by the doubts about Epuiano’s/Vassa’s origin (still he had some political purposes which definitely have influenced his writings).
A bit more difficult is the use of his descriptions of Africa. Here the question of authenticity is important and the book loses value as a source if we accept that the author has not been an eye-witness. However, also here we must not forget Equiano’s/Vassa’s political goals.
I’d like to start my response this week with a quote from the section of Vassa’s account where he describes an aspect of his life in Africa which a few other people have already alluded to in their responses:
“We practiced circumcision like the Jews and made offerings and feasts on that occasion in the same manner as they did. Like them also, our children were named from some event, some circumstance, or fancied foreboding at the time of their birth.” (page 24)
This passage is not the only place where Vassa compares the people of his homeland to the Jews. What’s up with that?
Boulukos’ piece gives us a hint in footnote 49 where he refers to another author who dismisses Vassa’s mention of the Jews as part of the “Hametic Hypothesis” that claims that there is a race of people in Africa who descended from Noah’s outcast son Ham, an idea with a checkered past. The Hametic Hypothesis has been used both to justify slavery—Noah cursed Ham’s son to be “a servant of servants… unto his brethren” for an indiscretion he committed (Genesis 9:20-27)—and the basis for racial hierarchies within Africa in scientific racism. While the Hametic hypothesis might explain Vassa’s invocation of the Jews, it is not the only plausible explanation, and dismissing it so summarily eschews the question of why Vassa would include it in his account of his people and the larger role it could be said to play in his narrative.
One important thing to note is that the Hametic Hypothesis was not the only 18th century theory that explored links between Africans and the Jews. There’s also the “lost tribes” theory, which claims that ten of the twelve original Jewish tribes were deported from Israel around 700 BCE and resettled elsewhere in the world. If Vassa was in fact invoking this theory rather than the Hametic Hypothesis, his comparison suddenly seems less nefarious. Instead of parroting a racist European view of African origins, his comparison of his people to the Jews becomes an effective rhetorical move. His people are no longer African “savages,” but are instead merely Jews in exile (not outcasts like Ham), folding their identity into a group that while somewhat reviled in Europe, could not legitimately be enslaved. Even if his reference to the Jews was taken in the Hametic sense, it would still bring to mind the story of the Jews’ slavery in Egypt and their subsequent liberation by God. It’s not hard to imagine how these biblical comparisons could have had a powerful affect on Vassa’s Christian readership and their attitudes towards slavery.
I have two questions this week related to this:
1. If Vassa’s use of the Jews was in fact a rhetorical device, it shows us that he was very aware of his audience and the sort of strategies that could be used to convince them of the validity of his account. How should our audience figure into how we write history? Who are they? What metaphors resonate with them? What rhetorical strategies can or should we use to help legitimate our constructions of the past?
2. People outside of academia generally believe that history is a positivist endeavor that involves the collection and narrativisation of objective facts. In light of the texts we’ve been reading and the questions they’ve raised about what we can legitimately say about the past, if we want to make a Vassa-like move, is it fair for us to borrow the sort of knowledge creating authority a positivist view of history confers when interacting with the public?
I found Carretta’s analysis of the work interesting because it addressed the notions of fiction. The majority of his article seemed to be an attempt to gauge the truth claims and assess the factuality of Vassa’s account. While this does have some use, I think it ultimately does not matter. To me, this work is as credible a primary source even if it were fiction. I have always been fascinated by the historian’s use of fiction, and I have largely been shaped by texts that advocate fiction in history. Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters immediately comes to mind, as she asserted the need to discuss the intermingling of fact and fiction. Even if Vassa’s work were to be completely fictional (not that I think it was) it was still produced by a historical actor, and the author’s intentions, whether fictional or not, were shaped by the society (societies?) he interacted with. The more interesting question that Carretta tackles is why people questioned Vassa’s authenticity, and fighting narratives taking place between the real and the fictional power contained in the source.
I think I liked Boulukos’s analysis because he seemed to push past the question of authenticity to explore the much richer context of how his work was understood at the time. To me this places more power in the author, showing how Vassa had the potential to shape racial discourses through his own account. The contextualization of the writing makes the fact vs. fiction debate irrelevant, and instead focuses on what power this text holds in 1789. The fact vs. fiction debate does not take place in the now, but instead sheds light on the politics of legitimacy at the text’s publication which should not be answered in the now but used as a historical lens to assess the politics of the past.
I have always struggled with primary sources. I have a hard time rejecting anything they say, and I try to hold to their every word as I navigate what they are saying. I have a hard time discrediting sources, especially ones that can be attributed to memory, like this source can be. I have difficulty discerning between against the grain, along the grain, in the grain. I am not saying that I think texts just produce facts, but I find that any time we try to create a guideline for how to read a text we are limiting the limitless potential of thousands of other texts. I got rather caught up in the narrative here and found it fascinating outside of a historical analysis. To me this was like a fiction because it was captivating. Ultimately it was a story. Can historians ever fully and confidently adopt fiction? Do we need to debate the merits of fictive vs. non-fictive accounts? What would adopting fiction into the historian’s toolkit accomplish?
I don’t know if I agree with prior posts that Carretta’s aim is simply to discredit Equiano’s account of how life really was in the age of the slave-trade by pointing out the inaccuracies in the Narrative. And I do think it matters quite a bit if Equiano was born in South Carolina but chose to write that Africa was his birthplace. Not because it casts doubt on Equiano’s honesty and faithfulness to a “what-really-happened” kind of history, but because it accentuates and underlines his entrepreneurial cunning – a trait for which there is already plenty of evidence in the text. It further complicates Equiano’s identity because it suggests that he saw it as something malleable. So if it is true (which I think it may well be) that he lied about his origins for either political or economic reasons – or both – it only makes him an even more interesting subject for historical investigation. Why would Carretta otherwise have gone through the whole tedious business of assessing the Narrative’s veracity – something, it is worth mentioning, racists have been doing since its original publication – if not to make it that much more interesting to us?
The stories Equiano tells us in The Interesting Narrative are already filled with examples of the fluidity of individual identities. We see how identities can be formed, as when Equiano converts to a new religion and casts off “the burden of sin” (127), or when he declares loyalty to a country that he bore no familial ties to. Conversely, identities can also be shattered – the most obvious example being the literal physical extraction of natives from their African homeland. But Equiano’s world is also one where men consciously mistake others’ identities with malicious, self-interested intent. I am thinking here for instance of the two white men in Savannah who “meant to play their usual tricks with [Equiano] in the way of kidnapping” (105). Surrounded by such trickery, Equiano realizes that he, too, can play with his identity – inflate it, channel other identities. He thus boasts of duping “unenlightened Indians” during a moment of crisis for his crew (139). And when one has learned this, it is not such a far stretch to want to maneuver and shift the facts of one’s life in order to sell books, or whatever else.
Equiano may indeed be beyond a comparison to a sort of real-life black Odysseus – Homer’s seafaring proto-capitalist, except African (or is it Afro-Atlantic?). He could quite simply be seen as the modern homo oeconomicus, whom all of us have come to resemble.
I would like to take this opportunity to challenge some of the opinions above about Carretta. Let me preface what follows by saying this: I too found Boulukos’s article more accessible and, in David’s words, “richer”; I too took issue with some of Carretta’s methodology (nods to Tyler and Devin); and I asked/am asking myself similar questions that Kate posed. However, I cannot accept the notion that Carretta’s interrogations ultimately don’t matter, or that his inferences are beside the point. In fact, I think we should be wholeheartedly embracing Carretta’s motives, if not his methodologies.
First, I think we need to acknowledge the scope of this short article: this is a very specific reading of specific aspects of The Interesting Narrative by a single scholar. It is a minute part of a sweeping undertaking that Carretta has devoted himself to over the course of his career. It is an abbreviated offshoot of something that I think piqued his interest during his research, and something that he wanted to add to the corpus of literature about Equiano. In all likelihood, this was a short little piece that reflected on specialized information Carretta had unearthed, and that he knew would be of interest and informative to like-minded scholars.
****EDIT: Sorry everyone, the good old copy-and-paste method failed me when I tried to post my thoughts. Please see below for my FULL blog post. *****
À la Tryggvi, I would like to take this opportunity to challenge some of the opinions above about Carretta. Let me preface what follows by saying this: I too found Boulukos’s article more accessible and, in David’s words, “richer”; I too took issue with some of Carretta’s methodology (nods to Tyler and Devin); and I asked/am asking myself similar questions that Kate posed. However, I cannot accept the notion that Carretta’s interrogations ultimately don’t matter, or that his inferences are beside the point. In fact, I think we should be wholeheartedly embracing Carretta’s motives, if not his methodologies.
I think we need to acknowledge the scope of this short article: this is a very specific reading of specific aspects of The Interesting Narrative by a single scholar. It is a minute part of a sweeping undertaking that Carretta has devoted himself to over the course of his career. It is an abbreviated offshoot of something that I think piqued his interest during his research, and something that he wanted to add to the corpus of literature about Equiano. In all likelihood, this was a short little piece that reflected on specialized information Carretta had unearthed, and that he knew would be of interest to like-minded scholars.
Moreover, I don’t think it makes sense to outright compare what Carretta is trying to do to Boulukos’s efforts. Their pieces have distinct agendas. While both engage in close readings of The Interesting Narrative, they diverge in the other sources that they read closely. Carretta is inclined to closely examine the material traces of Equiano’s narrative, whereas Boulukos concerns himself with analyzing other contemporaneous texts (aside: should we also be questioning Boulukos’s methodology? As far as I can tell, the only contemporaneous author who dealt with abolitionism that Equiano cited in The Interesting Narrative was Benezet. I concur that Equiano was very much an active participant in the climate of the 18th-century debate on Africa, as Boulukos argues, but I didn’t immediately get the sense that Equiano was directly familiar with all of what Jefferson, Snelgrave, Atkins, Smith, and Norris had to say. I think it likely that he engaged with these pro-slavery voices vis-à-vis Benezet’s Some Historical Account of Guinea, and certainly in his daily life, but I thought Boulukos’s argument would have been corroborated somewhat more had those pro-slavery narrators been cited in The Interesting Narrative itself. I should hasten to mention that I read the original edition of The Interesting Narrative, so I don’t know if the later editions engaged with these pro-slavery voices more directly. I also leave open the possibility that I may simply have failed to notice where Equiano directly engaged with these voices independent of Benezet.)
Essentially, what I’d like to suggest is that Carretta’s article is in fact fundamental to what we’re investigating this week. I agree with Tryggvi that the possibility that Equiano was born in Carolina makes him and his narrative even more interesting. Moreover, I think Carretta is asking us to seriously interrogate how we use literary sources. Carretta’s other works clearly indicate that he believes in the utility of literary sources in historical inquiry. I think, though, that he is stressing the importance of evaluating and contextualizing truth claims put forth by actors/narrators in/of history. I would argue that we shouldn’t view Carretta as someone who’s needlessly caught up in the tedium of statistics, registers, and ship logs. Rather, I see him as someone who in many ways is doing what we as historians say we strive to do, that is, corroborating as much as possible the various strands of evidence and truth claims that we encounter, and constantly reminding ourselves and others not to take things at their face value. He is asking us to consider how our subjects assembled their texts, and how we assemble ours.
There’s an example from Chinese historiography on homosexuality that I think illustrates some of these things that I’m arguing, but I will save it for discussion. I’m looking forward to hashing out our contrasting viewpoints on these texts tomorrow.
I?d like to address my response to those who prefer the notion that Equiano?s memoir is a credible primary source from which Carretta?s revelations detract little. I take this to mean that Equiano?s account of Igbo society, the Atlantic Slave Trade, diaspora and identity are of equal value to those of someone who can be certifiably placed there at the time and verified as having experienced that which Equiano (perhaps) fabricates.
In a review, for the Guardian, of Carretta?s ?Equiano the African: Biography of a Self-made Man? the author instances a journalist for the Chronicle of Higher Education who suggests that “Carretta’s conclusions threaten a pillar of scholarship on slave narratives and the African diaspora. Questioning Equiano’s origins calls into doubt some fundamental assumptions made in departments of African-American Studies.?
First, can anyone tell me what is at stake? I can imagine, but there doesn?t seem to be a lot of concern relayed here ?why?
In one of the supplementary readings, ?The Historian and His facts?, Carr invites the reader to consider the process by which ?a mere fact about the past is transformed into a fact of history? (12). He concludes with the following: ?It will depend, I think, on whether the thesis or interpretation in support of which [a given instance is cited] is accepted by other historians as valid and significant? (12).
I want to ask those of you who fall into the above camp? Are the reasons for which you find this source valuable independent of received, potentially politicized, notions about the subject matter? In other words, how does one avoid, or deflect, the trap Carr outlines, in regards to Equiano’s narrative or more generally.
If we hold that the fabrication of important elements of this narrative doesn?t matter, I feel the necessary thing to do is ask: Can we imagine a case in which it does matter? If so, aren?t we then in a compromised position as historians?
One of the things that this text and the two readings which go with it reminded me is that authors of historical texts themselves had agendas, nor did they write them for future historians, facts which remind us that we should not take texts at face value. I think many of us who have read the primary sources for different courses or research projects can confess that there were times when we found ourselves reading a text and almost unconsciously taking the information in that particular text as an objective reflection of a past reality that we can learn from and/or use to support a particular argument. Carretta’s opinion is that Vassa had a vested interest in resurrecting, or perhaps even creating, an African identity for himself as Equiano in order to make his account authentic and give it power in the public sphere.
This particular issue is quite important, since naively accepting the objectivity of a primary source can create a whole misguided discourse. This is particularly salient for the historiographical turn in Yuan and Ming Dynasty Chinese history. The authors of the Ming dynastic history and its predecessor, the Veritable Records of the Ming had particular agendas. The legitimacy of a dynasty and indeed that of the succeeding dynasty to their Han subjects, depended largely on rhetorical and ideological adherence to the Confucian canon and its related discourse on rulership. The legitimacy of the Ming was very vocally, and strategically, based on the defeat of the previous Mongol dynasty and the revival of orthodox Confucian rule. Though pronouncements of the dynasty played to this idea, much of the government, military, geopolitical strategy and even culture was influenced by Mongol patterns established in Inner Asia and during the Yuan. However, the official historical records were often sanitized of these elements and written to reflect Confucian orthodoxy. Previously, this led many scholars solely using those records to write histories that described the Ming as a dyed in the wool Chinese dynasty that reversed what the Mongols had done, reviving Han culture and bearing little continuity with the Mongols. Current historiography has been exceedingly critical of this trend and made much progress in revising it. Interestingly enough, many scholars still support a very uncontextualized view of the official histories and maintain their accuracy and objectivity. I often wonder if this is irresponsibility, ignorance, or simply another perspective they feel overrides the new.
This brings to mind another particular dilemma faced by historians: whether or not the difficulty in verifying contents should make us more strategic in the use of particular texts. In this I mean the use of a text with which we know we cannot contextualize with other texts very well. I am reminded from my own field of the case of the Orkhon inscriptions which provide perhaps the only example of Old Turkic and the account of a Khan establish the Turkic Empire from the standpoint of the Turks. However, much of the inscriptions are fragmentary, the stele being damaged, and many parts have been inferred. Although no one would discount the importance of having deciphered these inscriptions, it is hard to determine what is fact from epic fiction, since this stele most likely had a political significance for the Turkic polity (providing support for the regime or some other unifying or power projecting function). How much can one rely on such texts to recreate past events? To what extent do other texts enable us to interpret this, since records are sporadic in other languages as well. A further interesting dilemma is that if there are other texts which do help us understand a particular text, how appropriate are they? Do they bring us closer to an understanding of the text? Or, is there such a gulf that separates the texts that the historian has to go to herculean efforts to bridge the two? If so, how valuable is an analysis that comes out of this? Returning to the question of the Orkhon inscriptions, there are Chinese records which do record and recount the rise of that particular Khan and his empire, but from a very Sinocentric position. Details, description and causation is wholly divorced from the methods and seeming objectives of the inscriptions. Much detail itself is questionable and highly moralized, since the Turks were seen as barbarians. This leaves the historian in the difficult position of the arbitrator of truth. Who is right? Which story is faithful to what happened? Overuse of Chinese texts has been seen as an ideological and cultural standpoint/decision. If we use other texts to contextualize then, how much is this an ideological decision?
This week’s readings brought me to reflect more deeply on the use of interviews in writing history. Gustavus Vassa/Olaudah Equinao’s Narrative demonstrates the way that memory is imperfect and autobiographical stories can have a purpose. As I read I found myself reflecting: Does it matter whether Equiano was born in Africa or in South Carolina? Does it matter whether he writes about his own personal memories or draws upon the memories of another? Regardless of its veracity, a story can still move readers and invoke sympathy. If Euqiano’s goal was to move his readers to reject slavery, did his narrative not compel his readers in this direction? Equiano’s claim to authenticity makes his autobiography seem more trustworthy, which no doubt makes his position against slavery more convincing, but perhaps all that matters is that his story is convincing and true generally, if not personally. Caretta points out that “the discrepancy between the ages and dates Vassa records…may be due simply to a confused memory of childhood events…or [it] may have been rhetorically motivated” (103. No doubt the construction of his entire autobiography was rhetorically motivated. But is it problematic if his account is based on oral history and reading, rather than personal experience? I think Boulukos is right in moving beyond the discussion of Equiano’s date of birth to a discussion about his purpose for writing and the uniqueness of his position in the slave trade debate of his time.
Looking at Equiano’s Narrative as a primary source document, I can’t help but think of the importance of a multifaceted approach to constructing the past – corroboration, historical empathy, understanding context. I find myself imagining the use of interviews in my research and realizing their significance, both on the level of what happened, and on the level of how that person thinks/feels about what happened.
I had a similar response as Kate to these readings. Caretta’s focus on the temporal plausibility of the narrative given by Equiano/Vassa seems to be totally besides the point. Not only do I care very little as to whether or not he was actually born in Africa, or when he may have travelled to England (and Caretta’s narrative seems to be just as or more speculative as Equiano’s), but also Caretta is relying on a problematic system of authentication, stating that “Cugoano and his friend published their works without any of the authenticating documentation or mediation by white authorities that prefaces the works of Phillis Wheatley or Ignatius Sancho and other black writers to reassure readers that the claim of authorship is valid and to imply that their words have been supervised before publication.” (p.98) While he makes a point that other authors (Wheatley and Sancho) writing similar accounts did go through this step, he fails to acknowledge the power structures evident in the process, and does not consider for a moment the possibility that Equiano/Vassa was intentionally not pursuing this avenue of recognition. Further, his analyses seems to be ironically ahistorical, as if he expects a historical figure to act with precise continuity throughout their lifetime, and not change themselves or their stories in any meaningful way.
It does raise a pertinent question though, which I think Boulukos does a good job of addressing: how can we read agency into underrepresented historical actors? One way is through historical context, which Boulukos argues very convincingly that Equiano/Vassa was writing in conversation with his contemporaries in the British debate about slavery. Another is to acknowledge that historical actors change over time and exist as we do from moment to moment, rather than in some kind of clear continuity easily represented in the historical record.
I came across several accounts from the Pacific Northwest in the early 1800s this summer, all of which, written by ‘non-authorial’ voices – Fur Traders, Frontier women, sailors – and all made similar claims to the truthfulness of their accounts. So I wonder if this is more a function of the genre of ‘accounts from abroad’ during the 18th and 19th centuries than a real honest to goodness truth claim?
There is also an interesting recent Radiolab episode about memory, which punctures our conceptions of accuracy of memory. This idea of memory as a neural event and physical reaction is much more widely accepted now than in ’98 when Caretta was writing. Caretta seems to be arguing that Equiano/Vassa really had a ‘great’ memory, so why would he mess up some of these early dates? But we know that memory is not such a cut and dry phenomenon. This is but one example…
http://www.radiolab.org/story/91569-memory-and-forgetting/
This week’s reading on Equiano appears quite interesting because even though it is kind of “common knowledge” of the cruelty of slavery and everyone should be able to guess about the contents of this book, it still gives me some new understanding of slavery and things related to it.
For example, at the beginning, the author spent a lot of efforts portraying his first “home country”: Africa, Essaka. Even though from Caretta’s article we know that there is a question about his identity as being born in Africa, we can see that he tried to portray his home town as being simple, happy, sophisticated both socially, culturally and even religiously. Also, as I was reading that part, I was surprised to see his effort of linking his own hometown people with Jews: “I cannot forebear suggesting what has long struck me very forcibly, namely the strong analogy which even by this sketch, imperfect as it is, appears to prevail in the manners and customs of my countrymen and those of the Jews” (21). He tried to argue that even though the life of his country men are simple(even primitive), they were “like the Israelites in their primitive state”; thus, placing his race as no inferior to any other races, even to the most noble and honorable race of Christianity.
The two supplementary readings are very much in conversation with this little introduction. Caretta focuses her research mainly on the identity of the author Euqiano, arguing that since other information he provided through his voyages were incredibly accurate, the contradictory facts about his origin must indicated that “Vassa manipulated some of the facts in his autobiography” (9). Boulukos, even though very much agreed with Caretta about her discovery, was not really interested in the real identity of Euquiano. He argued that whether he was born in Africa or not was not important, and what really mattered was that he was actually in conversation with the large slavery debate during that time, using his autobiography. Therefore, it would be understandable that he would try to link his race with Jews, just in order to show that they were not inferior in nature(to debate with those pro-slavery authors and also to provide new understandings for those anti-slavery authors).
Also, being a very pious Christian(if the account is accurate) himself, I have the sense of the author trying to link true Christianity, humane characteristics and even his own identity, with England. Throughout the narrative, the author often used a very sarcastic tone to refer to those brutal slave traders as those “Christian” masters, along with their unlawful, brutal and bloodthirsty characteristics, indicating that those people away from England were not true Christians, or even noble human beings. However, with everything positive he would relate with England(except sometimes he also showed his fond of the Turks): “he[brutal “Christian” master] was just proceeding to strike me, when fortunately a British seaman on board, whose heart had not been debauched by a West India climate, interposed and prevented him” (68). Thus, as I was reading it, I thought he was very fond of Englishmen, culture and the identity, which kind of surprised me because if he was kidnapped and forced to went through all of that, he would resent Englishmen. Boulukos’ article answers my question: “A claim of English identity by a Black colonial remind Equiano’s readers of the contradictions between slavery, racial oppression, and ‘English liberty'”; and in Equiano’s mind, “English liberty” should be “applied consistently to all people” (8, 10)
Moreover, there is another thing strikes my interest. As the author, later settled down in Britain for a while, “I[He] soon found [his money] would not be sufficient to….my[his] own necessary expenses….I[He] thought it best, therefore, to try the sea again in quest of more money, as I[he] had been bred to it” (110). It was quite interesting for me to find that Equiano(or some black people) who ought to be the victims of the slave trades and also the whole process of colonization and expansion, also benefited themselves using the same method. Moreover, as he wrote later: “thus I went on till May 1773, when I was roused by the sound of fame, to seek new adventures, and to find, towards the north pole, what our Creator never intended we should, a passage to India” (114). Now even his motivations sounds very much similar to white people, which appears very interesting to me.
In short, this week’s reading, supplied with two articles on the identity of the author and context of his time, opens new ground for us to re-examine the slave trade and new identities and influences it might influenced Equiano and his countrymen.
One of the things that the Equiano/Vassa readings had me thinking about is how we deal with primary sources which are otherwise phenomenal historical documents except for the fact that they lie. On the one hand, a first person account from a 18th-century slave’s perspective is something you would want to use as a historian of slavery. Assuming for the sake of argument that the bit regarding life in Africa was fabricated, however, how can his book actually serve as historical evidence?
Carretta’s method is to corroborate what Equiano/Vassa says with outside sources, believing in what corroborates and disbelieving in what doesn’t. In the case of the former, he assumes that justification arises out of the coherence of the different sources (see pg. 100 for example). But how can a source play any part in supporting justification if it isn’t itself justified? I think the normal answer here would be along the lines of “well he had no motive to lie, was in a position to know the truth,” etc., basically that he is a reliable narrator. But if we say that any part of the book is evidence because Equiano/Vassa is a factually reliable narrator, then proof of his unreliability would seem to remove the grounds of justification, not just for those parts where he lies, but seemingly for the entire book. At that point, why should we care if two sources corroborate, since we know that at least one of them has no epistemic value. We seem to be caught in this conundrum where a problem in one part of the source seems to shit on the whole thing.
So, if my characterization of this problem is correct (open question, I think), what do historians do with a text like this? Do we face a dilemma between saying that either a claim has at least some degree of justification just by virtue of someone (in this case Equiano/Vassa) making it, or that we can’t actually use Equiano/Vassa as evidence of things that happened? Can we see his reliability as a narrator in a contextual way, i.e. isolate those areas where he is reliable from those where he isn’t? Clearly these are bigger issues, but Equiano/Vassa seems to me like a good case study of them. There’s also the issue of looking through the text versus looking at it, and none of this is to say that the book couldn’t be used by a literary-turnist, for example, but that’s another topic of discussion.
This week’s readings again raises the theme of textuality and “deconstructing” the text that we have been exploring in this course. Boulukos sees imbedded in the text a clever and calculated response to the common parameters of the pro-slavery/anti-slavery debate in England at the time, and I find this line of argument quite convincing (this is not to say I dismiss the possibility that Equiano was in fact born in Africa).
This raises the question, if Equiano was crafting the text with a political agenda, and the attitudes and mentalities of his audience in mind, do modern historians not to the same thing? For example: a scholar writes an account of Guyana’s former president Forbes Burnham (1923-85). It’s considered a good or even “classic” piece of scholarship, meticulously footnoted, it can be found in most university libraries, etc. The book discusses Burnham’s expansion of military spending by 500% in 3 years (true story) but doesn’t discuss, say, Burnham’s efforts to introduce potato farming in the Pakaraima mountains as an additional source of revenue and food security for the remote indigenous communities there. The lengthy exploration of the former and the omittance of the later potentially present the reader with two very different Burnhams. Of course, being selective with facts is different than making something up – but it still represents an intentionally constructed narrative containing the biases, assumptions, and yes possibly even an “agenda” of the author.
Another interesting subject the Equiano text raises is that of modern myths and legends themselves, their role in society and politics and how we engage with them as historians. For a while now I have been thinking about this in relation to Guyana, and understanding Guyanese history; how there are these common tales and anecdotes you here time and time again in Guyana – on the street, in a bar, around a dinner table – about the president, or the former president, or the leader of the opposition (e.g. “the president practises obeah (“witchcraft”) and he goes to a black woman on the east bank every Sunday to be bathed in mud”) – that have no empirical evidence whatsoever to support them, yet a great number ardently believe, and will defend their conviction with a phrase like: “It’s a known thing” (someone with a more analytical brain than I could have a great time deconstructing that phrase in itself). To me what is interesting here is where these myths come from, what purpose do they serve, what do they tell us about society and how ordinary people make sense of their world, engage with established authorities of information (e.g. mainstream news, government), what interests and agendas do they serve, etc. I should also add I am not implying this is unique to developing societies or anything like that – for example, right there are apparently a lot of Canadians that think Muslim women are receiving citizenship without ever having to prove their identity by showing their face – this of course, is a myth.
Like Kate and Tyler I also had to think about the importance of Equiano’s/Vassa’s place of birth. I came to the conclusion that it depends on the question we address to the text (for what we make it a source): For example for a research about trade in the Carribean it is quite non-relevant if Equiano/Vassa was born in Africa or not.
But if we want to analyse the big complex of slavery, colonialism and racism, it depends on the specific question and on the specific part of Equiano’s/Vassa’s text we want to analyse. I personally think that this book can give useful hints about everyday-life racism in the 18th century and those chapters are not contested by the doubts about Epuiano’s/Vassa’s origin (still he had some political purposes which definitely have influenced his writings).
A bit more difficult is the use of his descriptions of Africa. Here the question of authenticity is important and the book loses value as a source if we accept that the author has not been an eye-witness. However, also here we must not forget Equiano’s/Vassa’s political goals.
I’d like to start my response this week with a quote from the section of Vassa’s account where he describes an aspect of his life in Africa which a few other people have already alluded to in their responses:
“We practiced circumcision like the Jews and made offerings and feasts on that occasion in the same manner as they did. Like them also, our children were named from some event, some circumstance, or fancied foreboding at the time of their birth.” (page 24)
This passage is not the only place where Vassa compares the people of his homeland to the Jews. What’s up with that?
Boulukos’ piece gives us a hint in footnote 49 where he refers to another author who dismisses Vassa’s mention of the Jews as part of the “Hametic Hypothesis” that claims that there is a race of people in Africa who descended from Noah’s outcast son Ham, an idea with a checkered past. The Hametic Hypothesis has been used both to justify slavery—Noah cursed Ham’s son to be “a servant of servants… unto his brethren” for an indiscretion he committed (Genesis 9:20-27)—and the basis for racial hierarchies within Africa in scientific racism. While the Hametic hypothesis might explain Vassa’s invocation of the Jews, it is not the only plausible explanation, and dismissing it so summarily eschews the question of why Vassa would include it in his account of his people and the larger role it could be said to play in his narrative.
One important thing to note is that the Hametic Hypothesis was not the only 18th century theory that explored links between Africans and the Jews. There’s also the “lost tribes” theory, which claims that ten of the twelve original Jewish tribes were deported from Israel around 700 BCE and resettled elsewhere in the world. If Vassa was in fact invoking this theory rather than the Hametic Hypothesis, his comparison suddenly seems less nefarious. Instead of parroting a racist European view of African origins, his comparison of his people to the Jews becomes an effective rhetorical move. His people are no longer African “savages,” but are instead merely Jews in exile (not outcasts like Ham), folding their identity into a group that while somewhat reviled in Europe, could not legitimately be enslaved. Even if his reference to the Jews was taken in the Hametic sense, it would still bring to mind the story of the Jews’ slavery in Egypt and their subsequent liberation by God. It’s not hard to imagine how these biblical comparisons could have had a powerful affect on Vassa’s Christian readership and their attitudes towards slavery.
I have two questions this week related to this:
1. If Vassa’s use of the Jews was in fact a rhetorical device, it shows us that he was very aware of his audience and the sort of strategies that could be used to convince them of the validity of his account. How should our audience figure into how we write history? Who are they? What metaphors resonate with them? What rhetorical strategies can or should we use to help legitimate our constructions of the past?
2. People outside of academia generally believe that history is a positivist endeavor that involves the collection and narrativisation of objective facts. In light of the texts we’ve been reading and the questions they’ve raised about what we can legitimately say about the past, if we want to make a Vassa-like move, is it fair for us to borrow the sort of knowledge creating authority a positivist view of history confers when interacting with the public?
I found Carretta’s analysis of the work interesting because it addressed the notions of fiction. The majority of his article seemed to be an attempt to gauge the truth claims and assess the factuality of Vassa’s account. While this does have some use, I think it ultimately does not matter. To me, this work is as credible a primary source even if it were fiction. I have always been fascinated by the historian’s use of fiction, and I have largely been shaped by texts that advocate fiction in history. Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters immediately comes to mind, as she asserted the need to discuss the intermingling of fact and fiction. Even if Vassa’s work were to be completely fictional (not that I think it was) it was still produced by a historical actor, and the author’s intentions, whether fictional or not, were shaped by the society (societies?) he interacted with. The more interesting question that Carretta tackles is why people questioned Vassa’s authenticity, and fighting narratives taking place between the real and the fictional power contained in the source.
I think I liked Boulukos’s analysis because he seemed to push past the question of authenticity to explore the much richer context of how his work was understood at the time. To me this places more power in the author, showing how Vassa had the potential to shape racial discourses through his own account. The contextualization of the writing makes the fact vs. fiction debate irrelevant, and instead focuses on what power this text holds in 1789. The fact vs. fiction debate does not take place in the now, but instead sheds light on the politics of legitimacy at the text’s publication which should not be answered in the now but used as a historical lens to assess the politics of the past.
I have always struggled with primary sources. I have a hard time rejecting anything they say, and I try to hold to their every word as I navigate what they are saying. I have a hard time discrediting sources, especially ones that can be attributed to memory, like this source can be. I have difficulty discerning between against the grain, along the grain, in the grain. I am not saying that I think texts just produce facts, but I find that any time we try to create a guideline for how to read a text we are limiting the limitless potential of thousands of other texts. I got rather caught up in the narrative here and found it fascinating outside of a historical analysis. To me this was like a fiction because it was captivating. Ultimately it was a story. Can historians ever fully and confidently adopt fiction? Do we need to debate the merits of fictive vs. non-fictive accounts? What would adopting fiction into the historian’s toolkit accomplish?
I don’t know if I agree with prior posts that Carretta’s aim is simply to discredit Equiano’s account of how life really was in the age of the slave-trade by pointing out the inaccuracies in the Narrative. And I do think it matters quite a bit if Equiano was born in South Carolina but chose to write that Africa was his birthplace. Not because it casts doubt on Equiano’s honesty and faithfulness to a “what-really-happened” kind of history, but because it accentuates and underlines his entrepreneurial cunning – a trait for which there is already plenty of evidence in the text. It further complicates Equiano’s identity because it suggests that he saw it as something malleable. So if it is true (which I think it may well be) that he lied about his origins for either political or economic reasons – or both – it only makes him an even more interesting subject for historical investigation. Why would Carretta otherwise have gone through the whole tedious business of assessing the Narrative’s veracity – something, it is worth mentioning, racists have been doing since its original publication – if not to make it that much more interesting to us?
The stories Equiano tells us in The Interesting Narrative are already filled with examples of the fluidity of individual identities. We see how identities can be formed, as when Equiano converts to a new religion and casts off “the burden of sin” (127), or when he declares loyalty to a country that he bore no familial ties to. Conversely, identities can also be shattered – the most obvious example being the literal physical extraction of natives from their African homeland. But Equiano’s world is also one where men consciously mistake others’ identities with malicious, self-interested intent. I am thinking here for instance of the two white men in Savannah who “meant to play their usual tricks with [Equiano] in the way of kidnapping” (105). Surrounded by such trickery, Equiano realizes that he, too, can play with his identity – inflate it, channel other identities. He thus boasts of duping “unenlightened Indians” during a moment of crisis for his crew (139). And when one has learned this, it is not such a far stretch to want to maneuver and shift the facts of one’s life in order to sell books, or whatever else.
Equiano may indeed be beyond a comparison to a sort of real-life black Odysseus – Homer’s seafaring proto-capitalist, except African (or is it Afro-Atlantic?). He could quite simply be seen as the modern homo oeconomicus, whom all of us have come to resemble.
I would like to take this opportunity to challenge some of the opinions above about Carretta. Let me preface what follows by saying this: I too found Boulukos’s article more accessible and, in David’s words, “richer”; I too took issue with some of Carretta’s methodology (nods to Tyler and Devin); and I asked/am asking myself similar questions that Kate posed. However, I cannot accept the notion that Carretta’s interrogations ultimately don’t matter, or that his inferences are beside the point. In fact, I think we should be wholeheartedly embracing Carretta’s motives, if not his methodologies.
First, I think we need to acknowledge the scope of this short article: this is a very specific reading of specific aspects of The Interesting Narrative by a single scholar. It is a minute part of a sweeping undertaking that Carretta has devoted himself to over the course of his career. It is an abbreviated offshoot of something that I think piqued his interest during his research, and something that he wanted to add to the corpus of literature about Equiano. In all likelihood, this was a short little piece that reflected on specialized information Carretta had unearthed, and that he knew would be of interest and informative to like-minded scholars.
****EDIT: Sorry everyone, the good old copy-and-paste method failed me when I tried to post my thoughts. Please see below for my FULL blog post. *****
À la Tryggvi, I would like to take this opportunity to challenge some of the opinions above about Carretta. Let me preface what follows by saying this: I too found Boulukos’s article more accessible and, in David’s words, “richer”; I too took issue with some of Carretta’s methodology (nods to Tyler and Devin); and I asked/am asking myself similar questions that Kate posed. However, I cannot accept the notion that Carretta’s interrogations ultimately don’t matter, or that his inferences are beside the point. In fact, I think we should be wholeheartedly embracing Carretta’s motives, if not his methodologies.
I think we need to acknowledge the scope of this short article: this is a very specific reading of specific aspects of The Interesting Narrative by a single scholar. It is a minute part of a sweeping undertaking that Carretta has devoted himself to over the course of his career. It is an abbreviated offshoot of something that I think piqued his interest during his research, and something that he wanted to add to the corpus of literature about Equiano. In all likelihood, this was a short little piece that reflected on specialized information Carretta had unearthed, and that he knew would be of interest to like-minded scholars.
Moreover, I don’t think it makes sense to outright compare what Carretta is trying to do to Boulukos’s efforts. Their pieces have distinct agendas. While both engage in close readings of The Interesting Narrative, they diverge in the other sources that they read closely. Carretta is inclined to closely examine the material traces of Equiano’s narrative, whereas Boulukos concerns himself with analyzing other contemporaneous texts (aside: should we also be questioning Boulukos’s methodology? As far as I can tell, the only contemporaneous author who dealt with abolitionism that Equiano cited in The Interesting Narrative was Benezet. I concur that Equiano was very much an active participant in the climate of the 18th-century debate on Africa, as Boulukos argues, but I didn’t immediately get the sense that Equiano was directly familiar with all of what Jefferson, Snelgrave, Atkins, Smith, and Norris had to say. I think it likely that he engaged with these pro-slavery voices vis-à-vis Benezet’s Some Historical Account of Guinea, and certainly in his daily life, but I thought Boulukos’s argument would have been corroborated somewhat more had those pro-slavery narrators been cited in The Interesting Narrative itself. I should hasten to mention that I read the original edition of The Interesting Narrative, so I don’t know if the later editions engaged with these pro-slavery voices more directly. I also leave open the possibility that I may simply have failed to notice where Equiano directly engaged with these voices independent of Benezet.)
Essentially, what I’d like to suggest is that Carretta’s article is in fact fundamental to what we’re investigating this week. I agree with Tryggvi that the possibility that Equiano was born in Carolina makes him and his narrative even more interesting. Moreover, I think Carretta is asking us to seriously interrogate how we use literary sources. Carretta’s other works clearly indicate that he believes in the utility of literary sources in historical inquiry. I think, though, that he is stressing the importance of evaluating and contextualizing truth claims put forth by actors/narrators in/of history. I would argue that we shouldn’t view Carretta as someone who’s needlessly caught up in the tedium of statistics, registers, and ship logs. Rather, I see him as someone who in many ways is doing what we as historians say we strive to do, that is, corroborating as much as possible the various strands of evidence and truth claims that we encounter, and constantly reminding ourselves and others not to take things at their face value. He is asking us to consider how our subjects assembled their texts, and how we assemble ours.
There’s an example from Chinese historiography on homosexuality that I think illustrates some of these things that I’m arguing, but I will save it for discussion. I’m looking forward to hashing out our contrasting viewpoints on these texts tomorrow.
I?d like to address my response to those who prefer the notion that Equiano?s memoir is a credible primary source from which Carretta?s revelations detract little. I take this to mean that Equiano?s account of Igbo society, the Atlantic Slave Trade, diaspora and identity are of equal value to those of someone who can be certifiably placed there at the time and verified as having experienced that which Equiano (perhaps) fabricates.
In a review, for the Guardian, of Carretta?s ?Equiano the African: Biography of a Self-made Man? the author instances a journalist for the Chronicle of Higher Education who suggests that “Carretta’s conclusions threaten a pillar of scholarship on slave narratives and the African diaspora. Questioning Equiano’s origins calls into doubt some fundamental assumptions made in departments of African-American Studies.?
First, can anyone tell me what is at stake? I can imagine, but there doesn?t seem to be a lot of concern relayed here ?why?
In one of the supplementary readings, ?The Historian and His facts?, Carr invites the reader to consider the process by which ?a mere fact about the past is transformed into a fact of history? (12). He concludes with the following: ?It will depend, I think, on whether the thesis or interpretation in support of which [a given instance is cited] is accepted by other historians as valid and significant? (12).
I want to ask those of you who fall into the above camp? Are the reasons for which you find this source valuable independent of received, potentially politicized, notions about the subject matter? In other words, how does one avoid, or deflect, the trap Carr outlines, in regards to Equiano’s narrative or more generally.
If we hold that the fabrication of important elements of this narrative doesn?t matter, I feel the necessary thing to do is ask: Can we imagine a case in which it does matter? If so, aren?t we then in a compromised position as historians?
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.