Olaudah Equiano and the Art of Spiritual Autobiography

Abstract

What does this anecdote signify? What is its point? Surely, at the most basic level it is a tableau of considerable pathos and charm, soliciting a smile and engaging our sympathy on behalf of the young outsider. It is, too, Equiano's reflection on the daunting but ultimately not prohibitive chasm that separates the orality of his childhood from the literate culture to which he crossed over. And, as Henry Louis Gates has demonstrated, it affords an instance of the central topos of eighteenth-century African-English writing.2 Gates traces this topos of the talking book back to the slave narrative of Ukawsaw Gronniosaw (1770); as Gronniosaw writes, rec-

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