Reviewed by:

• Before Equiano: A Prehistory of the North American Slave Narrative by Zachary McLeod Hutchins
• Jeannine Marie Delombard (bio)

Before Equiano's subtitle suggests that this new monograph offers a study of the texts and circumstances that yielded the genre known as the slave narrative, one of whose conventional starting points is The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gusatvus Vassa, the African (1789). It quickly becomes apparent, however, that Before Equiano is more revisionist history than "prehistory." In the introduction, Hutchins asserts that "because eighteenth-century newspapers were the source of the period's most numerous and popular materials on slavery and because their language and ideas shaped the first book-length, stand-alone auto/biographies of enslaved Africans, they should be read as slave narratives" (21). The claim is not simply that representations of slavery in the early American periodical press "shaped" the emergent genre but that "eighteenth-century newspapers" themselves "should be read as slave narratives" (21). As it turns out, the methodological intervention centers not on the newspapers so much as [End Page 158] how we read them. Calling on today's literary critics to adopt the "imaginative" reading that he attributes to eighteenth-century newspaper audiences, Hutchins proposes to redefine the slave narrative itself (7).

From Dorothy Porter and Marian Wilson Starling in the 1930s and 1940s, to Frances Smith Foster, John Blassingame, and William Andrews in the 1970s and 1980s, scholars of the slave narrative traced the genre's origins to ephemeral and often firsthand accounts of the lives of enslaved individuals in colonial newspapers, letters, broadsides, and pamphlets. Hutchins, by contrast, is interested in a much broader aggregate of "materials on slavery" (21)—advertisements for fugitives from slavery and accounts of trials or insurrections involving enslaved people, but also, crucially, foreign dispatches treating enslavement as a common wartime practice. Hutchins locates the beginnings of the genre in the minds of "imaginative readers" who "might be said to have mentally authored the first slave narratives as they consumed brief newspaper reports of enslaved individuals" (7). In this way, he maintains, "slave narratives were read by both black and white readers, long before they were bound and sold—even before they were written" (7). Moreover, because bondage was "a condition rhetorically and philosophically associated with war," he contends, these "stories of slavery were always embedded in a global political context" (21). As discussed below, Hutchins most powerfully illustrates the latter claim in chapters 3 and 4. Along the way, however, "the slave narrative" ceases to denote an account of the experience of enslavement and instead refers to any one of a number of "stories of slavery" (21).

Indeed, Before Equiano concludes by suggesting that, because John "Dickinson conceives of himself and his fellow colonists as slaves pressed into bondage by British duties" in the series of essays he originally published in the Pennsylvania Chronicle (1767–68), his Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania "might be described as one of the first North American slave narratives" (182). In this telling, it is Dickinson's belated white interlocutor, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur who, in Letters from an American Farmer (1782), anticipates the nineteenth-century development of the genre with, as Hutchins puts it, "his advocacy for racializing the slave narrative" (188). Crèvecoeur's portrayals of enslaved people in Letters, Hutchins suggests, offered a reality check to the American colonists' rhetorical self-fashioning as the "slaves" of their British masters. The most devastating such portrayal (which Hutchins quotes at length) appears in letter 9, when Crèvecoeur's [End Page 159] narrator, James, finds a Black man suspended in a cage, deprived of food and water, and slowly becoming carrion for insects and birds of prey. But the gothic scene also illuminates, contra Hutchins, the importance of distinguishing the slave narrative from other "stories of slavery." The grotesquely mutilated body of Crèvecoeur's caged slave offers a "shocking spectacle," even as it attests to the voyeurism of the white author, his narrator, and his presumed readership (J. Hector St. John de...

审阅者：

• 《Equiano 之前：北美奴隶叙事的史前史》扎卡里·麦克劳德·哈钦斯 (Zachary McLeod Hutchins)
• 珍妮·玛丽·德隆巴德（简介）

《Before Equiano》的副标题表明，这本新专着对产生奴隶叙事流派的文本和环境进行了研究，其传统起点之一是非洲人奥劳达·埃奎亚诺（Olauudah Equiano）或古萨特乌斯·瓦萨（Gusatvus Vassa）的有趣叙事（1789 年）。 ）。然而，人们很快就会发现，《爱奎亚诺之前》更多的是修正主义历史，而不是“史前史”。哈钦斯在引言中断言，“因为十八世纪的报纸是该时期关于奴隶制的数量最多、最受欢迎的材料的来源，而且因为它们的语言和思想塑造了第一本关于被奴役的非洲人的独立自传/传记，应被视为奴隶叙事”（21）。这种主张不仅是美国早期期刊媒体对奴隶制的表述“塑造”了新兴的流派，而且“十八世纪的报纸”本身“应该被解读为奴隶叙事”（21）。事实证明，方法论干预的重点不是报纸，而是我们如何阅读报纸[完第 158 页] 。哈钦斯呼吁当今的文学批评家采用他认为十八世纪报纸读者的“富有想象力”的阅读方式，并提议重新定义奴隶叙事本身（7）。

从 20 世纪 30 年代和 1940 年代的多萝西·波特 (Dorothy Porter) 和玛丽安·威尔逊·斯塔林 (Marian Wilson Starling)，到 1970 年代和 1980 年代的弗朗西斯·史密斯·福斯特 (Frances Smith Foster)、约翰·布拉辛盖姆 (John Blassingame) 和威廉·安德鲁斯 (William Andrews)，研究奴隶叙事的学者将这种类型的起源追溯到对奴隶生活的短暂且往往是第一手的描述。殖民地报纸、信件、大报和小册子上都有这样的人物。相比之下，哈钦斯对更广泛的“奴隶制材料”感兴趣（21）——奴隶制逃亡者的广告以及涉及被奴役者的审判或叛乱的报道，但最重要的是，将奴役视为一种常见战时的外国快报实践。哈钦斯将这一类型的起源定位于“富有想象力的读者”的头脑，他们“可以说是在阅读有关被奴役者的简短报纸报道时在精神上创作了第一个奴隶叙事”(7)。通过这种方式，他坚持认为，“早在奴隶叙事被装订和出售之前，甚至在它们被写出来之前，黑人和白人读者就已经阅读了奴隶叙事”（7）。此外，他认为，由于奴役是“在修辞上和哲学上与战争相关的一种状况”，这些“奴隶制的故事总是嵌入在全球政治背景中”（21）。如下所述，哈钦斯在第三章和第四章中最有力地说明了后一种主张。然而，一路走来，“奴隶叙事”不再指对奴役经历的描述，而是指许多“故事”中的任何一个。奴隶制”（21）。

事实上，《爱奎亚诺之前》的结论是，因为约翰在他最初发表在《宾夕法尼亚纪事报》 （1767-68 年）上的一系列文章中“将自己和他的殖民同胞视为被英国义务奴役的奴隶” ，所以他的书信宾夕法尼亚州的一位农民“可能被描述为北美最早的奴隶叙事之一”（182）。在这个故事中，狄金森迟来的白人对话者 J.赫克托·圣约翰·德·克雷维科尔在《美国农民的来信》（1782 年）中预见了这一流派在 19 世纪的发展，正如哈钦斯所说，“他的倡导将奴隶叙事种族化”（188）。哈钦斯认为，克雷夫科尔在《书信》中对被奴役者的描绘，为美国殖民者在言辞上自我塑造为英国主人的“奴隶”提供了现实检验。这种最具破坏性的描述（哈钦斯详细引用了）出现在第 9 封信中，当时 Crèvecoeur 的[完第 159 页]叙述者詹姆斯发现一名黑人被吊在笼子里，没有食物和水，慢慢地变成了昆虫和昆虫的腐肉。猛禽。但与哈钦斯相反，哥特式场景也阐明了将奴隶叙事与其他“奴隶制故事”区分开来的重要性。克雷维科尔被关在笼子里的奴隶被肢解的怪诞尸体提供了一个“令人震惊的景象”，尽管它证明了白人作者、他的叙述者和他假定的读者的偷窥癖（J.赫克托·圣约翰·德……