Literary Contexts: Genre Prototype?

In addition to his influence in the contemporary abolition movement, Equiano has been cited as a founding father of the genre of African-American (and Afro-British) slave narratives, and his Interesting Narrative has acquired the status as a founding document.

Henry Louis Gates has called Equiano’s narrative “the prototype of the Nineteenth-Century slave narrative."[1] In order to understand the significance of this judgment, it is useful to explore the body of work that followed Equiano’s.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Documenting the American South (DocSouth) project has digitized the full text of nearly 300 slave narratives, published between 1734 and 1930. In this collection, "North American Slave Narratives," over two-thirds (204) of the texts are autobiographies (as opposed to biographies or fictionalized accounts), and exactly half of these (102) were first published before or during the American Civil War. Overall, over 160 of the accounts in this corpus (several accounts have estimated publication dates in the 1860s) were published before the end of the Civil War.

Equiano’s account, first published in 1789, was preceded by as many as seven of these other slave narratives (DocSouth gives approximate dates for two of these likely antecedents).

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