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.

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.

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.

scholarly journals AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND SPACE: SLAVE NARRATIVES OF HARRIET JACOBS AND MARY PRINCE

2020 ◽  
pp. 33-41
Author(s):  
Anshu Surve ◽  
Anwesha Basu
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
West Indian ◽  
Harriet Jacobs ◽  
Bench Mark ◽  
Conceptual Tool ◽  
Mary Prince ◽  
Art Form ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 19Th Century

The women writers in the 19th century represented themselves in the form of writings and presented their ideas through the medium of autobiography, a genre in the literary world. Genre, as per Collins dictionary, is ‘a particular type of literature, painting, music, film or other art form which people consider as a class because it has special characteristics’. Autobiography is a tool to represent the ‘Self’ and during the 19th century, the women used it as one of her weapons to challenge the patriarchal and dominant upper class, wherein they were categorised in the marginalized section in terms of their origin and in creative writing field. Their writings became an agency or rather a space- emotional space within the cultural and societal space, where they put forth their emotions, desire to become emancipated, create a bench mark alongside other male writers in the literary world and inspire other women. This research paper attempts to explore autobiography in a new light through spatial theory as proposed by Henri Lefebvre and Edward Soja, vis-à-vis place and will posit the narratives which portrays the injustice done upon the marginalized people during the 19th century. Space will act as a conceptual tool to narrate the slave narratives Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl written by herself (1861) and The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave. Related by Herself (1831) of Harriet Jacobs, an Afro-American slave in America and Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave in England respectively.

The Habit of Deference: The Imperial Factor and the “University Question“ in Upper Canada

1977 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fred D. Schneider
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
Upper Canada ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Half Century ◽  
Common Basis ◽  
European Settlement ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The University

“Imperialism,” like “empire,” is a word with many connotations; briefly, it describes an attitude of mind to the possession and use of dependent territories by the metropolitan power and the effect of colonization on the society and polity of the colonized. Despite attempts to discover a common basis to imperialist thinking at all times in history, most historians perceive differences, both in degree and kind, between different empires and at various times in the history of a single empire. They approach their task either with a definition of “imperialism” or a theory about the phenomenon it is meant to describe, and are concerned primarily with the effects of policies rather than how and why they were made; or they ask why something happened when it did, in the way it did, and are concerned primarily with the making of policy and the motives of the policy-makers.Following the second approach, this paper explores one of the most crucial and continuous questions that imperial administrators had to resolve: the problem of self-government in colonies of European settlement, leading to the ultimate transfer of power; and by looking at the “University Question” in Upper Canada during the half-century after 1791, it examines how the perpetual adjustment that was “policy-making” actually happened. More specifically, in answering the question, “Who ran the British Empire?”, it is concerned not so much with the effects of Britain's control over subject peoples as with the method by which it exercised that control.

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.

5. Empire and prayer book

2018 ◽  
pp. 85-100
Author(s):  
Brian Cummings
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
British Empire ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Book Of Common Prayer ◽  
Prayer Book ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Book ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Common Prayer

The words ‘to propagate the worship of God in the English tongue’ became the motto of the British Empire in the 19th century. Their first appearance, however, came in a proclamation accompanying the first edition made outside of England—in Dublin, 1551. ‘Empire and prayer book’ describes the history of new editions of the Book of Common Prayer first in Ireland and in North America after English settlement in 1607. It also outlines the publication of the American Book of Common Prayer after independence. From the middle of the 19th century, the Book of Common Prayer took on the mantle of colonial acculturation. Versions were published in Chinese, Tamil, Urdu, Bengali, Malay, Maori, and Swahili.

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