Foundations: Defoe and Equiano

This chapter discusses Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative as foundational texts of emergent enlightenment thinking about the subject in relation to modernity and slavery. The aesthetics of their entangled foundational tonality is characterised by self-reflexive descriptions of psychological interiority, a retrospective temporal framework, religious conversion, and a belief in the emerging modern market economy. While both self-made men develop an emotive claim to Britishness, the representation of familial feelings remains stifled. In contrast to insular adventurer Robinson Crusoe, former slave Olaudah Equiano’s life story is much more strongly reliant on bonds to establish commonality. Moreover, their constructions of masculinity are spatially distinct. While Equiano’s “oceanic” identity is mostly formed in movement on the sea, Crusoe’s “insular” version seems to fend off any form of Otherness. For Equiano claiming familiarity is instrumental in the process of being recognised as a citizen, for Crusoe, the flight from familial obligations is part of the narrative appeal of his adventure. Thus, this chapter argues that while Black writing is often dismissed as imitative, it is in fact the marginalised perspective of the ex-slave that can be considered foundational of a more realistic description of intersubjectivity in English writing.