“The Stranger and the Exile Who Is in Our Land within Our Gates”: Mary Prince as a Black British Immigrant

2020 ◽  
Vol 118 (2) ◽  
pp. 234-251
Author(s):  
Alan Bewell
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brycchan Carey

Thousands of Africans lived in Romantic-era Britain, including Ignatius Sancho, Olaudah Equiano, and Mary Prince, who between them initiated the tradition of Black British writing. Each had experienced slavery as a child; each achieved their freedom, and each wrote the story of their lives: Sancho’s Letters were the bestseller of 1782, proving to fashionable London society that Africans were equally capable as Europeans. Equiano’s 1789 Interesting Narrative was part of the movement to abolish the slave trade, while Prince was the first African woman to tell her life story in England in her 1831 History of Mary Prince.


Author(s):  
Laura Fish

In A Room of One’s Own (1929) Virginia Woolf asserts: “Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size”. (34) The use of the mirror is key to Woolf’s arguments about the position of women in general and in particular that of women writers. Complicating Woolf’s view less than a century later, I examine how black women function as looking-glasses in a dual way: as blacks, we shared the past (and now share the current) fate of black people reflecting the “darker” side of white people, as many whites projected onto blacks the unacknowledgeable traits of their own nature. The mirror is also key then to the way in which racial oppression has been analysed in literature. My paper offers an account, by way of selected examples from the history of our literature, of indicating how the mirror has been essential to how black British women are viewed and reflected back. I suggest that the misshapen image in the looking glass created by white people and also black men, allows them to see an inflated reflection of themselves, to assume false feelings of superiority, and to perpetuate oppression against us. I focus on Mary Prince, Mary Seacole, Una Marson, Joan Riley and Helen Oeyemi–authors whose work either anticipates or relates to Woolf’s notion of mirroring, by seeking ways to addressor overcome the situation in which we are placed. The texts explored not only trace the development of the tradition of our writing - the shift from being represented to representing ourselves– but also present a range of cultural and political views and identify three recurring themes: firstly, the denigration in our portrayal; secondly, the assumed superiority white people and black men adopt over us; and thirdly our resistance in remonstrating against such treatment and exposure.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorge L. Giovannetti-Torres
Keyword(s):  

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 97-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Harris

This essay draws upon the author’s performance script Fall and Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project as a provocation for considering the ways performance texts provide a threshold for somatic inquiry, and for recognizing the limits of scholarly analysis that does not take up performance-as-inquiry. Set at the Empire State Building, this essay embodies the connections and missed possibilities between strangers and intimates in the context of urban modern life. Fall’s protagonist is positioned within a landscape of capitalist exchange, but defies this matrix to offer instead a gift at the threshold of life/death, virtual/real, and love/loss. Through somatic inquiry and witnessing as threshold experiences, the protagonist (as Benjamin’s flaneur) moves through urban space and time, proving that both scholarship and performance remain irrevocably embodied, and as such invariably tethered to the visceral, the stranger, risk, and death.


2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-124
Author(s):  
Áron Telegdi-Csetri ◽  
◽  
Viorela Ducu ◽  
Keyword(s):  

1987 ◽  
Vol 83 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-58
Author(s):  
Kristin Couper
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Elizabeth Shannon

Study abroad begins long before students leave their own shores. The moment that children enter daycare, nursery school, or kindergarten for the first time, they are in foreign territory, and all their antennae are out, testing, absorbing, learning. They begin to develop the first of their many multiple identities. They are no longer "Johnny" or "Sarah" whom everyone knows and loves at home, but Johnny or Sarah whom no one knows nor initially cares about, and they have to figure out what kind of a new identity they will develop so the danger zone becomes as safe as home.  Leaving familiar surroundings- the sounds, smells, safety, and food of home- and realizing, quite abruptly, that they must learn to adapt to the demands and needs of strangers, is the first and the most challenging "trip abroad" they will ever take. They will use the same set of skills, more mature, more polished (we hope) when they arrive on a foreign campus and move in with a host family or into an international dormitory.  Learning to make the journey with ease, whether it is on the first day of school or the day a plane drops one in a foreign field, is a necessary accomplishment. We have to make friends out of our peers; we have to gain the respect of our teachers; we have to develop curiosity and concern about the people around us. The stranger they seem, the more there is to learn. To fear diversity is to fear life itself. As the world becomes smaller and more integrated, the more crucial this accomplishment grows. 


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