Equiano class 10/07: The Construction of Self in The Interesting Narrative

Choose one or two of the following prompts for "discussion" and compose response(s) to it or them (at least 500 words).  Don't worry about accuracy of the structure of your response; in other words, you are not writing polished essays but responding and sharing ideas as you would in class.  Once responses are up, you might interact with each other's ideas.  Respond using the "Comment" boxes at the end or send me your responses via email if you are having difficulty with that.

(1) Choose one passage in the Narrative that we have not already discussed (identify with chapter division of your edition--stating edition--and cite the first sentence) and talk about how any of the existing eighteenth-century structures we already discussed (the novel, the spiritual autobiography, travel narrative, the picaresque) influence this moment in the text.

(2) Adam Potkay focuses on the Narrative as spiritual autobiography.  An excerpt from his seminal essay is included in the supplementary materials of the Norton edition (382-392).  He argues that "Equiano reads and renders his own life--and perhaps by extension the life of his race--as mirroring the movement of Biblical history from the Old Testament to the New.  That is he reads the pattern of his life as reduplicating the pattern of salvation history found in the Christian Bible."  Either engaging or not with the essay, discuss the idea in terms of a later passage or passages (after the childhood episode we discussed last time) that occurs in the Narrative.

(3) What do you make of Equiano's proposal at the end of the narrative for a "system of commerce" to be established in Africa?  How does such a  proposal fit with his anti-slave trade argument throughout (use other passages in responding)?  Has Equiano become too "white," too European by the end of his Narrative?  Is this proposal just symptomatic of the fluidity of the "self" at the heart of the Narrative?

(4) Consider William Wilberforce's argument in his "Speech in the House of Commons" (Norton p. 282):

When we consider the vastness of the continent of Africa; when we reflect how all other countries have for some centuries past been advancing in happiness and civilization; when we think how in this same period all improvement in Africa has been defeated by her intercourse with Britain; when we reflect that it is we ourselves that have degraded them to that wretched brutishness and barbarity which we now plead as the justification of our guilt; how the slave trade has enslaved their minds, blackened their character, and sunk them so low in the scale of animal beings that some think the apes are of a higher class, and fancy the orang-outang has given them the go-by. What a mortification must we feel at having so long neglected to think of our guilt, or attempt any reparation! It seems, indeed, as if we had determined to forbear from all interference until the measure of our folly and wickedness was so full and complete; until the impolicy which eventually belongs to vice was become so plain and glaring that not an individual in the country should refuse to join in the abolition; it seems as if we had waited until the persons most interested should be tired out with the folly and nefariousness of the trade, and should unite in petitioning against it.	9
Let us then make such amends as we can for the mischiefs we have done to the unhappy continent; let us recollect what Europe itself was no longer ago than three or four centuries. What if I should be able to show this House that in a civilized part of Europe, in the time of our Henry VII., there were people who actually sold their own children? What if I should tell them that England itself was that country? What if I should point out to them that the very place where this inhuman traffic was carried on was the city of Bristol? Ireland at that time used to drive a considerable trade in slaves with these neighboring barbarians; but a great plague having infested the country, the Irish were struck with a panic, suspected (I am sure very properly) that the plague was a punishment sent from heaven for the sin of the slave trade, and therefore abolished it. All I ask, therefore, of the people of Bristol is, that they would become as civilized now as Irishmen were four hundred years ago. Let us put an end at once to this inhuman traffic—let us stop this effusion of human blood.	10
The true way to virtue is by withdrawing from temptation; let us then withdraw from these wretched Africans those temptations to fraud, violence, cruelty, and injustice, which the slave trade furnishes. Wherever the sun shines, let us go round the world with him, diffusing our benevolence; but let us not traffic, only that we may set kings against their subjects, subjects against their kings, sowing discord in every village, fear and terror in every family, setting millions of our fellow creatures a-hunting each other for slaves, creating fairs and markets for human flesh through one whole continent of the world, and, under the name of policy, concealing from ourselves all the baseness and iniquity of such a traffic.	11
It will appear from everything which I have said, that it is not regulation, it is not mere palliatives, that can cure this enormous evil. Total abolition is the only possible cure for it.

To what extent is Equiano's purpose and sentiment in his Narrative similar to those expressed here by Wilberforce?  Does the fluidity of "self" we have discussed whereby Equiano is simultaneously "same" and "other" strenghten or complicate his humanitarian argument?  Can you see other purposes than presenting the anti-humanity of the slave trade (is this even the main purpose?) in the Narrative?  In your responses, use later passages than the ones we have already discussed.