Talking Books, Selling Selves: Rereading The Politics Of Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative

Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789) has often been seen as being ambiguously implicated in the emergence of liberal modernity, with Equiano’s self-purchase and free-trade proselytizing marking out both the promise and the danger of economic individualism. This essay, while paying close attention to these arguments, also seeks to move beyond this conceptual paradigm by exploring how Equiano’s autobiography connects with the wider political compexities of the Revolutionary era. In particular, I use recent historiographical debates about the values of the Founding Fathers to reframe the Interesting Narrative within an ideological universe where classical republicanism and modern liberalism existed as forces that were both antagonistic and inseparable. When considered in relation to the social theory of figures as diverse as Adam Smith and Benjamin Rush, Equiano’s pioneering slave narrative can be seen as engaging not only with competing models of liberalism but also with the possibilities and problems of civic humanism. Moving rhetorically between print and profit, self-interest and disinterest, virtue and commerce, the Interesting Narrative stands revealed as a deeply conflicted text which uses a patchwork of political ideas to negotiate the minefields of African-American bondage

The Face of Poverty : Physiognomics, Social Mobility, and the Politics of Recognition in the Early Nineteenth-Century American Novel

From Jacob Riis to Michael Harrington, observers of American poverty have often focused, in literal and metaphorical ways, on the faces of the economically dispossessed, finding in them a means to generate emotional responses that are more personalized than those offered by sociological data. For these social reformers, the “face of poverty” contains the potential to rectify what Harrington calls the U.S.’s pervasive “social blindness” in relation to the poor, yet despite the long tradition of such efforts to reveal “the other America” this blindness seems to persist in contemporary literary and cultural analysis. This persistent invisibility is in fact rooted in precisely the optical rhetoric that this tradition so often relies upon, a rhetoric whose origins and evasions I trace to the early nineteenth century, when modern discourses of poverty were being formulated. More specifically, I focus on the “parabolic mobility novel,” a group of fictional narratives published from 1800-1815 that typically trace the fall into poverty and eventual providentially-instigated return to wealth of bourgeois characters. Combining the theories of sympathy-as-self-identification expounded by Adam Smith with the interpretive logic of physiognomy-as-moral-interiority popularized by Johann Caspar Lavater, these novels produced a conservative model of the “politics of recognition” that, rather than involving an acknowledgment of the Other on their own terms, revolved around the projection of middle-class values onto the poor. Through their moments of anagnoristic recognition, the plots of these novels effectively established the now deeply-ingrained tendency to replace the individuality of the poor with external beliefs and assumptions