Tres autores caribeños: la esclavitud y la esfera pública decimonónica en las obras de Mary Prince, Mary Seacole y Martín Morúa Delgado

Este trabajo examina los escritos de tres autores caribeños decimonónicos que abordaron la esclavitud y la raza en sus obras: la narrativa de Mary Prince, una mujer esclavizada; el relato de viaje de la jamaiquina Mary Seacole, y la obra inicial del cubano Martín Morúa Delgado. Se analiza su relación con la esfera pública en un período en el cual las personas de color en el Caribe fueron mayoritariamente excluidas de los debates letrados que giraban en torno a la esclavitud. La investigación se enmarca en las teorías de la esfera pública y de los contrapúblicos, y dialoga con la periodización de la esfera pública caribeña propuesta por Raphael Dalleo.

African-British Literature

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.

Memory, Identity and the Scottish Remembrance of Slavery

Chapter 4 undertakes a twofold exploration of the contributions of Scottish writing in shaping transatlantic identities through retrospective testimonial accounts of slavery. It first examines the work of John Gabriel Stedman and Thomas Pringle, both associated with prominent first-hand descriptions of the horrors of transatlantic slavery. These works include Stedman’s account of his mercenary experiences in the Dutch plantation colony of Surinam, Narrative of a Five Years Expedition and The History of Mary Prince, which Pringle edited and supplemented with his own material. These writings have received much critical attention as retrospective accounts of enslavement, yet the Scottish dimension of these writings consistently has been overlooked. This chapter also explores how the memory of transatlantic slavery informed a Scottish national past that was itself imagined as ‘cultural trauma’. Donald Macleod’s Gloomy Memories was an acrimonious response to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s travel memoir Sunny Memories, which had lauded the abolitionist sympathies of the Duchess of Sutherland, while dismissing out-of-hand Macleod’s remembrances of Sutherland cruelty and injustice during the Clearances of the 1810s. Gloomy Memories represents a key cultural-memory text that continues to shape an understanding of historical trauma in Scotland – for both Clearance and slavery.

Mary Prince ‘At Home’ in Blackwood’s: Maga’s Origins and the End of Slavery

The 1831 slave narrative The History of Mary Prince caused a particular stir in Scotland. Some of the rankest attacks against Prince’s account came in a series of Blackwood’s essays by James MacQueen, a Scot who had recently returned from the slave plantations of the Caribbean. Much of MacQueen’s spleen was directed toward Prince’s chief abolitionist sponsor, Thomas Pringle, a fellow Scot and one of the co-editors of William Blackwood’s initial house periodical, the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine—when the publication was edited by fellow-Scot, Thomas Pringle. Emphasizing MacQueen’s perverse deployment of contemporary Scottish discourses of homecoming, this essay interrogates how magazines like Blackwood’s functioned as a key proving ground for late-Romantic theories of race, empire and ‘proper’ domesticity.

The Gravity of Mary Prince’s History

Sue Thomas uses this chapter to explore recent academic and creative projects about Mary Prince that reframe and add complexity to her story. Prince, enslaved in Bermuda, Grand Turk Island, Antigua and London, is best remembered for her influential slave narrative, The History of Mary Prince, published in 1831 by Thomas Pringle, secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society. The text was a graphic exposé of the atrocities of slavery and brought about a libel case against Pringle by one of Prince’s former owners. Thomas looks at work about Prince including Margot Maddison-MacFadyen’s archival research used both in her PhD dissertation and her historical fiction novella for young readers; themes of other-mothering explored in the poetry of Joan Anim-Addo; a video installation by Joscelyn Gardner using a toy theatre set that reflects on performative aspects of history through Prince’s story; and work by Cynthia M. Kennedy and Michele Speitz which brings attention to the harsh conditions of slaves working in Caribbean salt ponds as described by Prince. Finally, Thomas explores Prince’s conversion to Moravianism and how her experience of slavery chafed against the religious philosophy of quietism.