Mary Prince ‘At Home’ in Blackwood’s: Maga’s Origins and the End of Slavery

2020 ◽  
pp. 183-204
Author(s):  
Caroline McCracken-Flesher
Keyword(s):  
Slave Narrative ◽  
Mary Prince ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
At Home

The 1831 slave narrative The History of Mary Prince caused a particular stir in Scotland. Some of the rankest attacks against Prince’s account came in a series of Blackwood’s essays by James MacQueen, a Scot who had recently returned from the slave plantations of the Caribbean. Much of MacQueen’s spleen was directed toward Prince’s chief abolitionist sponsor, Thomas Pringle, a fellow Scot and one of the co-editors of William Blackwood’s initial house periodical, the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine—when the publication was edited by fellow-Scot, Thomas Pringle. Emphasizing MacQueen’s perverse deployment of contemporary Scottish discourses of homecoming, this essay interrogates how magazines like Blackwood’s functioned as a key proving ground for late-Romantic theories of race, empire and ‘proper’ domesticity.

scholarly journals Trans-Colonial Collaboration and Slave Narrative: Mary Prince Revisited

2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 63-77
Author(s):  
Michelle Gadpaille
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
Upper Canada ◽  
Standard Account ◽  
Slave Emancipation ◽  
Mary Prince ◽  
Susanna Moodie ◽  
History Of ◽  
Multiple Accounts

In 1831 in London, two formidable women met: Mary Prince, an ex-slave from Bermuda, who had crossed the Atlantic to a qualified freedom, and Susanna Strickland, an English writer. The narrative that emerged from this meeting was The History of Mary Prince, which played a role in the fight for slave emancipation in the British Empire. Prince disappeared once the battle was won, while Strickland emigrated to Upper Canada and, as Susanna Moodie, became an often quoted 19th century Canadian writer. Prince dictated, Strickland copied, and the whole was lightly edited by Thomas Pringle, the anti-slavery publisher at whose house the meeting took place.This is the standard account. In contesting this version, the paper aims to reinstate Moodie as co-creator of the collaborative Mary Prince text by considering multiple accounts of the meeting with Prince and to place the work in the context of Moodie’s pre- and post-emigration oeuvre on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Gravity of Mary Prince’s History

2020 ◽  
pp. 235-252
Author(s):  
Sue Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
Salt Ponds ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Video Installation ◽  
Religious Philosophy ◽  
Young Readers ◽  
Mary Prince ◽  
History Of ◽  
Harsh Conditions

Sue Thomas uses this chapter to explore recent academic and creative projects about Mary Prince that reframe and add complexity to her story. Prince, enslaved in Bermuda, Grand Turk Island, Antigua and London, is best remembered for her influential slave narrative, The History of Mary Prince, published in 1831 by Thomas Pringle, secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society. The text was a graphic exposé of the atrocities of slavery and brought about a libel case against Pringle by one of Prince’s former owners. Thomas looks at work about Prince including Margot Maddison-MacFadyen’s archival research used both in her PhD dissertation and her historical fiction novella for young readers; themes of other-mothering explored in the poetry of Joan Anim-Addo; a video installation by Joscelyn Gardner using a toy theatre set that reflects on performative aspects of history through Prince’s story; and work by Cynthia M. Kennedy and Michele Speitz which brings attention to the harsh conditions of slaves working in Caribbean salt ponds as described by Prince. Finally, Thomas explores Prince’s conversion to Moravianism and how her experience of slavery chafed against the religious philosophy of quietism.

The Prehistory of The History of Mary Prince: Thomas Pringle's "The Bechuana Boy"

2009 ◽  
Vol 64 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-322 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Shum
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
Moral Sentiments ◽  
Mary Prince ◽  
History Of ◽  
Central Argument ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Female Slave ◽  
Native Informant

Thomas Pringle, a Scottish journalist and poet, is best known to Anglo-American scholarship for his role as editor of the first black female slave narrative to be published in Britain, The History of Mary Prince (1834). Pringle had lived in the Cape Colony from 1820 to 1826, however, and produced an important body of work that is not well known outside South Africa. The central argument of this essay is that the poem "The Bechuana Boy" (first published in 1830) has not yet been recognized as a significant precursor text of the History, even though it helps us locate the narrative as informed by a structure of thought already present in Pringle's work. I examine in particular the way in which the poem engages the notion of sympathy, especially as this derives from Adam Smith's conceptualization in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Such metropolitan notions meet their limits in the colonized subject, who may only access the circuits of sympathy by divesting himself of indigenous selfhood. In comparing "The Bechuana Boy" and The History of Mary Prince, I draw attention to shared structural and thematic features and elaborate on the affinities between these works despite their generic and other differences. The essay concludes by offering a further brief comparison between the History and Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative (1789). Working with Gayatri Spivak's notion of the "native informant," I argue that the works under examination display similarities in their understanding of the protocols governing the admission of the native informant to mainstream public discourse.

NAMING, AGENCY, AND “A TISSUE OF FALSEHOODS” IN THE HISTORY OF MARY PRINCE

2001 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 397-411 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. M. Rauwerda
Keyword(s):  
Slave Narrative ◽  
Mary Prince ◽  
Susanna Moodie ◽  
History Of

THE 1831 SLAVE NARRATIVE THE HISTORY OF MARY PRINCE is generally thought to be Mary Prince’s autobiography.1 However, there is reason to believe that neither the narrating voice nor Prince’s name are actually hers, and that the agency ascribed to her in this narrative may be more representative of the agendas of external creators of the text than of Prince herself. In The History of Mary Prince, Prince’s name appears in various forms (Mary Prince, Mary Princess of Wales, Mary James, and Molly Wood) each of which reflects the objectives of different editors and owners. Editorial and mediatory figures such as Thomas Pringle, Susanna Moodie (née Strickland), John Wood, Moira Ferguson, and Ziggi Alexander manifest their influence in intrusions into the narrative, appendices, editorial prefaces, and introductions, all of which serve to construct Prince in ideologically and politically loaded ways, and which, in many cases, actually change her name by so doing. These givers of names generally attempt to hide their manipulations, and inadvertently also hide Prince.

White Zombie as Captivity Narrative and the Death of Certainty

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 19-25
Author(s):  
Mark C Anderson
Keyword(s):  
American Indians ◽  
American Slavery ◽  
Captivity Narrative ◽  
Early American ◽  
Arts And Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Black ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
American Society ◽  
Black Other

Horror films such as White Zombie (1932) reveal viewers to themselves by narrating in the currency of audience anxiety. Such movies evoke fright because they recapitulate fear and trauma that audiences have already internalized or continue to experience, even if they are not aware of it. White Zombie’s particular tack conjures up an updated captivity narrative wherein a virginal white damsel is abducted by a savage Other. The shell of the captivity story, of course, is as old as America. In its earliest incarnation it featured American Indians in the role as savage Other, fiendishly imagined as having been desperate to get their clutches on white females and all that hey symbolized. In this way, it generated much of the emotional heat stoking Manifest Destiny, that is, American imperial conquest both of the continent and then, later, as in the case of Haiti, of the Caribbean Basin. White Zombie must of course be understood in the context of the American invasion and occupation of Haiti (1915-1934). As it revisits the terrain inhabited by the American black Other, it also speaks to the history of American slavery. The Other here is African-American, not surprisingly given the date and nature of American society of the day, typically imagined in wildly pejorative fashion in early American arts and culture. This essay explores White Zombie as a modified captivity narrative, pace Last of the Mohicans through John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), the Rambo trilogy (1982, 1985, 1988), the Taken trilogy (2008, 1012, 2014), even Mario and Luigi’s efforts to rescue Princess Peach from Bowser.

scholarly journals Pleistocene aridification underlies the evolutionary history of the Caribbean endemic, insular, giant Consolea (Opuntioideae)

2021 ◽  
Vol 108 (2) ◽  
pp. 200-215 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucas C. Majure ◽  
Duniel Barrios ◽  
Edgardo Díaz ◽  
Bethany A. Zumwalde ◽  
Weston Testo ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Evolutionary History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Caribbean

THE (SLAVE) NARRATIVE OF JANE EYRE

2008 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 317-329 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Sun-Joo Lee
Keyword(s):  
West Indies ◽  
West Indian ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
British Imperialism ◽  
The West ◽  
American Slavery ◽  
Indian Slavery ◽  
At Home

InImperialism at Home, Susan Meyer explores Charlotte Brontë's metaphorical use of race and empire in Jane Eyre. In particular, she is struck by Brontë's repeated allusions to bondage and slavery and wonders, “Why would Brontë write a novel permeated with the imagery of slavery, and suggesting the possibility of a slave uprising, in 1846, after the emancipation of the British slaves had already taken place?” (71). Meyer speculates, “Perhaps the eight years since emancipation provided enough historical distance for Brontë to make a serious and public, although implicit, critique of British slavery and British imperialism in the West Indies” (71). Perhaps. More likely, I would argue, is the possibility that Brontë was thinking not of West Indian slavery, but of American slavery.

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