Beyond “Authenticity”: Migration and the Epistemology of “Voice” in Mary Prince’s History of Mary Prince and Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba

Abstract

In “Beyond ‘Authenticity’: Migration and the Epistemology of ‘Voice’ in Mary Prince’s History of Mary Prince and Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba ,” I suggest that the idea of “authenticity,” often deployed in feminist and postcolonial readings of women’s narratives, is too narrow a construct to be as productive in literary scholarship as it has been assumed. A parallel claim is that Mary Prince’s 1831 slave narrative offers a historical precedent and maintains a contemporary textual precedent in 20 th -century diasporic texts like Maryse Condé’s 1986 neo-slave narrative I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem . In both of these narratives, “authenticity” is obscured as migration and travel profoundly shape women’s identity politics. Much of the scholarly criticism that surrounds these texts, however, often presents both Prince and Tituba as independent, speaking subjects, each with a “true voice.” Such criticism, while well-intended in its attempt to offer and recuperate liberating presentations of women’s “voices,” maintains singular and limited understandings of a monolithic “black” or “female” experience.

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