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The life of olaudah equiano5/23/2023 ![]() ![]() 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. ![]()
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