The Other Interesting Narrative: Olaudah Equiano's Public Book Tour

John Bugg

85 citations0/0 files storedPMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Colonialism, slavery, and trade Autobiographical and Biographical Writing Literature: history, themes, analysis

Abstract

This essay examines the pre- and posthistory ofThe Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African(1789). Opening with a reconsideration of Vincent Carretta's influential claim that Equiano fabricated an African birthplace, I consider how Equiano's strategies of self-fashioning inform his trailblazing book tour of the British Isles in the early 1790s. If Equiano self-consciously designed his autobiography to become a best seller, his book tour performed the abolitionist manifesto that he was reluctant to put into print, as during his stops at cities and towns across the nation he worked to convert sympathetic readers into active abolitionists. Under the long shadow of the Pitt ministry's suppression of political activism in the 1790s, Equiano formed alliances with working-class and radical figures in Britain and Ireland, drawing on Shakespeare's Othello to develop a familiar public persona he could market during his book tour. (JB)

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 85 citations exist upstream.

References

1988The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism 1995The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings 2007The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century 1999Tropicopolitans 1988Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750 2010The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade by the British Parliament 1989Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750 1993A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain

Cited by

2016Print, Publicity, and Popular Radicalism in the 1790s 2007Olaudah Equiano, Written by Himself 2012Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa – What's in a Name?2009Toward a Philosophy of Transnationalism 2009Pictures in Bleak Houses: Slavery and the Aesthetics of Transatlantic Reform 2020

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.