Early American Literature

Abstract:

This article considers Equiano's turn to performance and spectacle in his Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano in relation to the eighteenth-century stage practice known as "freedom of the scenes." Widely regarded as the "prototype" of all subsequent slave narratives, the Narrative is infused with instances of racial mimicry, including whiteface and blackface, as well as self-fashioning through dress and style—scenes that evince potential for understanding Equiano's more radical abolitionist vision. In foregrounding race and mimicry, Equiano not only takes on the techniques of what was emerging in his lifetime as "blackface," but he reverses the dynamic, appropriating "whiteness" in whiteface acts in order to offer a sustained critique of racial injustice. By strategically positioning himself before audiences through mimicry, fashion and style, Equiano demonstrates how performance cultures help Black Atlantic subjects to constitute themselves as a people.