The Talking Book

equiano cropped_reduced.gif

“I had often seen my master and Dick employed in reading; and I had a great curiosity to talk to the books, as I thought they did; and so to learn how all things had a beginning: for that purpose I have often taken up a book, and have talked to it, and then put my ears to it, when alone, in hopes it would answer me; and I have been very much concerned when it remained silent.” (Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 106-107, TEI pagination)[1]

“If once he too was an object, like a watch, a portrait, or a book, now he has endowed himself with his master’s culture’s ultimate sign of subjectivity, the presence of a voice which is the signal feature of a face.” (Gates, 156) Signifying Monkey[2]

 

[1] Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself. Accessed October 24, 2015. http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/equiano1/menu.html.

[2]Gates, Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey : A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. Twenty-fifth-anniversary edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

[I'd like to build this into a landing page for the exhibit, possibly adding examples of the "talking book" trope from other narratives in the corpus. This is a placeholder for now.]

by Matthew McClellan