The most interesting and successful chapters were the last three, chapters 12 through 14: “Making a Life,” “The Art of the Book,” and “A Self-Made Man.” These chapters are devoted to the years immediately preceding and following the publication of The Interesting Narrative. Judged from this perspective, Carretta has produced a clear, well-researched, and at times quite interesting biography. I want to assess the work, then, in relation to what I take to be his implied audience. Carretta aims, it seems to me, for a more general audience. Instead, he simply takes modern biographical conventions at face value and uses them to tell the story of Equiano’s life and the development of his distinct and particular identity. Biographies pose a critical problem for any engaged, thoughtful twenty-first century scholar in that they rely on a notion of identity that has been challenged by a host of critical analyses interrogating the modern emergence of the very idea of the “individual.” Carretta avoids such issues entirely here. After all, is there anyone who would now deny the centrality of the slave trade in all its aspects to the emergence of the modern world? Equiano’s narrative plays a key role in such a narrative, and so his birth takes on special importance.Įquiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (University of Georgia, 2005) extends Carretta’s research on Equiano’s origins to provide the first scholarly biography in over thirty years of the man known in the Western world for most of his life as Gustavus Vassa. On what basis, after all, does one determine which instance of writing to consider authoritative when the evidence in these different kinds of sources conflict? Given the fact that Equiano’s narrative plays a crucial role in our understanding of a variety of historical, cultural, and literary issues, and given the fact that where you begin a story helps determine what you can say about that story and what work that story can do, I suppose the furor over Carretta’s claims is only to be expected.

Carretta’s essay, on the other hand, called our attention to evidentiary matters that involve questions of interpretive theory. Such claims were, as Equiano himself knew, aimed at discrediting his narrative and, in the process, the abolition movement with which that narrative was associated. Equiano himself sought to refute claims published in late eighteenth-century English periodicals that he had been born in the West Indies. This is not the first time Equiano’s origins have been questioned. When Vincent Carretta argued in “Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa? New Light on Eighteenth-Century Question of Identity” in a 1999 issue of Slavery and Abolition that the eighteenth-century author might have been born in South Carolina rather than Africa, as Equiano himself states in The Interesting Narrative, a scholarly firestorm erupted over the question of this former slave’s place of birth.

The autobiography of olaudah equiano