ENL 5236 Spring 2020 Ward

In 1807 Britain’s parliament passed the Act To Abolish the Slave Trade; 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 will examine what Ian Baucom in Specters of the Atlantic 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 recounting the story of the rebellious slave Oroonoko; moving into the eighteenth century, we’ll not only encounter proplanter georgic poetry like James Grainger’s four-book The Sugar-Cane and ameliorist novels like William Earle’s Obi, but also colonial narratives like Earle’s source text, Dr. Benjamin Moseley’s account of the runaway-slave-turned-highwayman, Jack Mansong, the “Terror of Jamaica” and planter-historian 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.

As we explore the complexities and 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” (David 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.”

Required Texts
Aphra Behn, Oroonoko
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
William Earle, Obi; or, The History of Three-Fingered Jack
Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative
Cynric R. Williams, Hamel, the Obeah Man
History of Mary Prince
H. G. De Lisser, White Witch of Rose Hall
Marlon James, Book of Night Women