ENL5236 – Spring 2027 – Ward

In 1807, Britain’s Parliament passed the Slave Trade Act; in 1833, the Emancipation Act was passed, effective August 1834, with the implementation of the Apprenticeship period, followed in 1838 with “full freedom.” In this course, we examine what Ian Baucom describes as the “piling up” of history, contextualizing the events that shaped the “fatal Atlantic beginning of the modern”—Caribbean slavery—and leading up to these landmark legislations. The discourses of rebellion, slavery, and abolition that provide this context cross generic and chronological lines: our enquiries begin in the Restoration period, with Henry Neville’s “porno-topia” The Isle of Pines (1668) and Aphra Behn’s novella Oroonoko; moving into the 18th century, we’ll not only encounter ameliorist novels like William Earle’s Obi, but also colonialist narratives like Edward Long’s description of Tacky’s Revolt in his History of Jamaica. These reports, along with slave narratives by Olaudah Equiano and Mary Prince and oral histories from Jamaica’s Maroon communities bring alive what Caribbean historian Hilary Beckles calls “one protracted struggle launched by Africans and their Afro-West Indian progeny against slave owners”—a struggle that spanned more than three centuries. The course ends with an examination of that struggle’s long-lived legacy as manifested in later Caribbean fiction: Michel Maxwell Philip’s Emmanuel Appadocca; or, Blighted Life, A Tale of the Boucaneers (1854), Edgar Mittelholzer’s My Bones and My Flute (1955), and Erna Brodber’s Myal (1988). As we explore the contradictions embedded in these narratives—rife with racialized stereotypes and, to our eyes, highly problematic assumptions about agency and identity—we will also work to avoid the “facile normalization of the present” (Scott, Conscripts of Modernity). In other words, we will refuse to essentialize differences between “us” and the historical “them” of our enquiry and look to these texts for our “now.”