This document provides context about Olaudah Equiano, an 18th century writer and abolitionist. It discusses the various genres of Equiano's narrative, including slave narrative, autobiography, and conversion narrative. Key themes in Equiano's work included Christianity, the horrors of slavery, and the growth of mercantilism and the transatlantic slave trade. The document also summarizes the historical context of the Atlantic slave trade, African diaspora, and concept of the Black Atlantic as developed by Paul Gilroy. Ships played a central role in connecting Europe, America, Africa, and the Caribbean during this era of forced and voluntary migration.

1. Olaudah Equiano
Slavery, Mercantilism, and the Black Atlantic

2. The Question of Genre
✤ travel account
✤ captivity narrative
✤ conversion narrative
✤ novel of education
✤ autobiography
✤ slave narrative

3. Narrative threads in Equiano
✤ God, Christianity, and conversion
✤ Technology, industry, and technological wonder
✤ Anti-slavery, description of horrors of slavery
✤ Mercantilism, commerce, liberalism, and trade
✤ Ideals of sympathy, sociality, and sentiment
✤ Education, reading, writing, and letters

4. Historical Context
✤ Oceanic Revolution
✤ Middle Passage
✤ African Diaspora
✤ Transatlantic Slave Trade
✤ Mercantile Capitalism
✤ The Black Atlantic

5. Oceanic Revolution
✤ World-historical event
✤ New sense of space and connection
✤ Ocean no longer obstacle, but a conduit
✤ New forms of knowledge
✤ New typologies of human difference
✤ New methods of categorization

6. During the Atlantic Slave Trade, 9.4 to 12 million people from Africa survived
the Middle Passage to arrive in the Americas as slave.
African Diaspora

8. Culture of Mercantilism: an extensive network wherein the
political center (usually a city) produced manufactured goods
and exchanged them for raw resources in an ever-expanding
network of trading outposts and colonies.

9. Mercantile Capitalism and Triangular Trade

10. •A political and cultural formation that refers not to a clearly defined
region or period, but to a multidimensional and trans-cultural space
characterized by movement and networking.
•A concept put forth by Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic: Modernity
and Double Consciousness (1992).
•A concept transcends the nation state and the constraints of
traditional racial, ethnic, and national categories.
•A space where hybrid identities are constructed.
•A kind of “negative continent” that makes it possible to trace lines of
social, historical and cultural connection between the Americas, Africa
and Western Europe.
The Black Atlantic

11. Olaudah Equiano’s Travels

12. The Sailing Ship

15. Advertisement for
Sale of Newly Arrived
Africans, Charleston,
July 24, 1769.

18. Equiano’s Birthplace: Africa or Carolina?

19. The Ship
From The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1992)
“I have settled on the image of ships in motion across the spaces
between Europe, America, Africa, and the Caribbean as a central
organising symbol for this enterprise and as my starting point. The
image of the ship — a living, microcultural, micro-political system
in motion — is especially important for historical and theoretical
reasons … Ships immediately focus attention on the middle
passage, on the various projects for redemptive return to an
African homeland, on the circulation of ideas and activists as well
as the movement of key cultural and political artifacts: tracts,
books, gramophone records, and choirs” (Gilroy 4).