초기 노예서사와 에퀴아노의 유산

Early Slave Narratives and the Legacy of Olaudah Equiano

Tracing extensively the critical issues and major characteristics of early slave narratives, this paper focuses on one of the earliest slave narratives, Anglo-African Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (1789). I explore the intertextual relations between Equiano's Interesting Narrative and the two representative nineteenth-century Afro-American slave narratives, Frederick Douglass's Narrative (1845) and Harriet Jacobs's Narrative (1861). While engaging critically with matters of self-representation, christianity, acculturation, diasporic identity, African literary tradition, and rhetorical strategies in the slave narratives, the second half of this paper demonstrates how a slave was born and how a slave became a man in the history of the eighteenth-century European civilization, focusing mainly on Equiano's Interesting Narrative. It further discusses how Equiano's Interesting Narrative is “signifying” in the writings of the Afro-American writers next century. With emphasis on the significance of Equiano's slave narrative, this paper recognizes Equiano's literary legacy in the history of Afro-American literature as well as diasporic literature.