"Excepting Himself": Olaudah Equiano, Native Americans, and the Civilizing Missionna

• Published in: Melus Vol. 34; no. 4; p. 15
• Main Author: Field, Emily Donaldson
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford Oxford University Press 01-12-2009
• Subjects: Acculturation; African Americans; African cultural groups; American Indians; Autobiographies; Bible; Cultural identity; Equiano, Olaudah (1745-1797); Literary criticism; Native North Americans
• ISSN: 0163-755X; 1946-3170

In 1999, Vincent Carretta changed the trajectory of Equiano scholarship with his evidence that Equiano may have been born not in West Africa but in the Carolinas, which would mean that his descriptions of Igbo country and the Middle Passage are at best composite pictures constructed for rhetorical purposes from other African Americans' memories.3 Such discussions, however, often have been limited by their tendency to consider issues of identity and acculturation solely on a black-white axis, ignoring the moments in Equiano's text in which non-European and non-African people appear and complicate dichotomous readings. Potkay has shown that Equiano's descriptions of "Eboe" customs and culture serve to draw a direct comparison between them and the Jewish patriarchs: "Equiano reads and renders his own life ... as mirroring the movement of Biblical history from the Old Testament to the New" ("Olaudah" 680).\n As Equiano fulfills what he sees as his own typological destiny and that of his people, he fills the hole left by his vacating the category of the primitive with Native Americans, showing ascendancy through his religious and cultural superiority.