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.

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 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.

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.

The Triumph of Olemaun: Survivance, Empathic Unsettlement, and Restorying the History of Canadian Residential Schools

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 132-146
Author(s):  
Anah-Jayne Markland
Keyword(s):  
Residential Schools ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Aboriginal Peoples ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Mandatory Education ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation ◽  
Young Readers ◽  
History Of ◽  
Age Appropriate

The ignorance of many Canadians regarding residential schools and their traumatic legacy is emphasised in the reports of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as a foundational obstacle to achieving reconciliation. Many of the TRC's calls to action involve education that dispels and corrects this ignorance, and the commission demands ‘age-appropriate curriculum on residential schools, Treaties, and Aboriginal peoples' historical and contemporary contributions to Canada’ to be made ‘a mandatory education requirement for Kindergarten to Grade Twelve students’ (Calls to Action 62.i). How to incorporate the history of residential schools in kindergarten and early elementary curricula has been much discussed, and one tool gaining traction is Indigenous-authored picturebooks about Canadian residential schools. This article conducts a close reading of Margaret Pokiak-Fenton and Christy Jordan-Fenton's picturebook When I Was Eight (2013). The picturebook gathers Indigenous and settler children together to contest master settler narratives regarding the history of residential schools. Using Gerald Vizenor's concept of ‘survivance’ and Dominick LaCapra's notion of ‘empathic unsettlement’, the article argues that picturebooks work to unsettle young readers empathetically as part of restorying settler myths about residential schools and implicating young readers in the work of reconciliation.

‘A disoriented vision of … fact’: Brian Friel, Francis Bacon, and Faith Healer

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 319-336
Author(s):  
Zosia Kuczyńska
Keyword(s):  
Creative Process ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Major Influence ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Faith Healer ◽  
Brian Friel ◽  
History Of ◽  
Composition Process

The Brian Friel Papers at the NLI reveal a long and relatively unexplored history of major and minor influences on Friel's plays. As the archive attests, these influences manifest themselves in ways that range from the superficial to the deeply structural. In this article, I draw on original archival research into the composition process of Friel's genre-defining play Faith Healer (1979) to bring to light a model of influence that operates at the level of artistic practice. Specifically, I examine the extent to which Friel's officially unacknowledged encounter with a book of interviews with painter Francis Bacon influenced the play in terms of character, language, and form. I suggest that Bacon's creative process – incorporating his ideas on the role of the artist, the workings of chance, and the extent to which art does violence to fact – may have had a major influence on both the play's development and on Friel's development as an artist.

THE ROOTS OF MODERN CAPITALISM: A MARXIST ACCOUNTING HISTORY OF THE ORIGINS AND CONSEQUENCES OF CAPITALIST LANDLORDS IN ENGLAND

2004 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rob Bryer
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Pivotal Role ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Accounting History ◽  
Agricultural Revolution ◽  
Historical Literature ◽  
Modern Capitalism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Industrial Revolutions

A major debate neglected by accounting historians is the importance of landlords in the English agricultural revolution. The paper uses accounting evidence from the historical literature to test Marx's theory that, from around 1750, England's landlords played a pivotal role by adopting and then spreading the capitalist mentality and social relations by enclosures and changes in the management of their estates and tenants. It gives an accounting interpretation of Marx's theory of rent and argues that the available evidence supports his view that the conversion of English landlords to capitalism underlay the later stages of the agricultural revolution. The conclusion explains the linkages in Marx's theory between the agricultural and industrial revolutions, and calls on accounting historians to conduct archival research into the agricultural roots of modern capitalism.

Popular Fiction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roslyn Weaver
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
History Of

This chapter discusses the history of popular fiction in Australia. The question of place has always been central to Australian fiction, not only as a thematic element but also as a critical or political preoccupation. In part, this is because popular fiction writers, wanting to attract broad audiences, either exploited their Australian content to appeal to international readers or have excised the local to produce a generic and thus more readily accessible setting for outsiders. The chapter considers works by popular fiction writers who adopt a range of positions in relation to their focus on place, but often tackle many different aspects of Australian social and historical change. These novels cover various genres such as crime fiction, historical fiction and romance, science fiction and fantasy, and include Fergus Hume's The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886), Nevil Shute's On the Beach (1957), Damien Broderick's The Dreaming Dragons (1980), and Cecilia Dart-Thornton's The Ill-Made Mute (2001).

The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself

1988 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 742
Author(s):  
K. F. Kiple ◽  
Mary Prince ◽  
Moira Ferguson
Keyword(s):  
West Indian ◽  
Mary Prince ◽  
History Of
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