A Black British Racial Formation

This chapter uses the Indies mentality to relearn British racial discourse, focusing on Julius Soubise, the Afro-British assistant of celebrity fencing master Domenico Angelo. During his own lifetime, Soubise's celebrity rivaled that of his better remembered Afro-British contemporaries, Olaudah Equiano and Ignatius Sancho. Soubise's “life geography” overflowed the borders of the Black Atlantic: born in Saint Kitts, he grew up in London and spent the last two decades of his life in Calcutta. The chapter first details his time in London, where he catalyzed tropologies of Eastern royalty in order to fashion himself as a “Black Prince,” thereby carving out a racialized but still exalted place for himself in the beau monde. It then follows Soubise to Calcutta, tracing how his racial self presentation altered in his journey from metropole to colony, from the circum-Atlantic to India. While British ideas about race certainly traveled from the former to the latter, India's colonial racial formation was also shaped by Mughal precedents. Indeed, aspects of the subcontinent's Indo-Persian racial formation even migrated westward through imperial networks, influencing the evolution of racial ideologies in the British Atlantic world.

African-British Literature

Thousands of Africans lived in Romantic-era Britain, including Ignatius Sancho, Olaudah Equiano, and Mary Prince, who between them initiated the tradition of Black British writing. Each had experienced slavery as a child; each achieved their freedom, and each wrote the story of their lives: Sancho’s Letters were the bestseller of 1782, proving to fashionable London society that Africans were equally capable as Europeans. Equiano’s 1789 Interesting Narrative was part of the movement to abolish the slave trade, while Prince was the first African woman to tell her life story in England in her 1831 History of Mary Prince.

America, England and the British Empire in the 18th Century African Slave Narratives

In the 18th century England several slave narratives were published and became quite popular. The best known – and the best researched – among them was Olaudah Equiano’s “The Interesting Narrative…”, one of the key works of the early abolitionist movement. Equiano’s (and other former slaves’) critique of slavery and their place in contemporary society is examined extensively in existing studies. But the British world was not limited to the colonies where the entire economic order was based on slave labour. These colonies existed in a wider context of the British Empire, with its own internal diversity of culture and everyday life. This article examines the way in which the slave narratives’ authors – Olaudah Equiano, Ukawsaw Gronniosaw and Ayuba Suleiman Diallo – perceived and described the Empire, its institutions, its cultural practices and the relations between its constituent parts, particularly between England and colonial America and West India.

Olaudah Equiano

Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, as he was known during his lifetime (b. 1745?–d. 1797), was a writer and polemicist of extraordinary abilities. His Interesting Narrative informs readers that he was born into a ruling-class Igbo family in 1745 and was kidnapped at the age of eleven. He tells readers that he was then sold to Europeans on the Gold Coast and made to endure the dreaded transatlantic Middle Passage to Virginia. After this time, he was sold to Michael Henry Pascal, an officer in the British Royal Navy, who, against Equiano’s will, named him Gustavus Vassa, a name that Equiano used throughout the rest of his life. Traveling with Pascal to England, Equiano was officially baptized, he tells us, in 1759. After his baptism, Pascal recruited Equiano for the Seven Years’ War. Equiano mistakenly assumed that Pascal would free him at the end of the conflict. Instead, Pascal sold him into West Indian slavery. From there, Equiano worked to save enough money and purchase his own manumission in 1766. With his new freedom, Equiano sailed the world, gaining the rank of able seaman, as he traveled across the Atlantic and even to the North Pole. After that harrowing journey, Equiano experienced a spiritual conversion to Methodism in 1774, and grew publicly involved with the antislavery debate, through letters, speeches, and his own Interesting Narrative. He married a white Englishwoman, Susanna Cullen, in 1792, and had two daughters, only one of whom survived to inherit the estate that Equiano left for her when he died on 31 March 1797. Biographer Vincent Carretta suggests that aspects of Equiano’s life story, including his African nativity, may be fabricated, as Equiano’s baptismal record lists him as “a Black born in Carolina 12 years old,” a possibility supported by one ship’s muster logs. Following on Carretta’s research, critics continue to debate important questions about genre, evidence, imagination, authenticity, testimony, and authorship.