| Summary: | My paper argues that Equiano exposes the late-eighteenth century life-writing
conventions of the autobiography as a white, male, middle-class practice of writing by
emphasizing Equiano’s ambivalent position within the literary market, the late eighteenth-century Atlantic world, and discourses of Enlightenment. As an “illegitimate speaker” within the Atlantic slave economy, Equiano strategically employs a variety of performative gestures in his narrative itself as well as in the paratext. These variations of established literary forms indicate Equiano’s singular status within the early Black Atlantic. The Narrative exemplifies the extent to which the nation-state often cannot be reconciled with personal states of existence including freedom, social position, and cultural belonging and that it is precisely the contradiction between these two states which affords authorial subjects like Equiano the possibility to self-legitimization through the narrative act.
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