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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Plotting The Plantationocene With The History Of Mary Prince, Shelby Johnson
Plotting The Plantationocene With The History Of Mary Prince, Shelby Johnson
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830
In this essay, I consider how The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself (1831) extends vital affordances for assembling a literary history of ecological rupture, settler colonialism, and transatlantic slavery. These insights arise from my experiences teaching Prince in “Plotting the Plantationocene in Early Atlantic Literature” (Fall 2021), a course which took up what it means to orient to historical formations of climate change as co-emergent with plantation systems. I argue that my students explored how figures like Prince open politically vibrant pathways for being in the world otherwise to plantation modernity.
Subversive Cartography: Teaching Mary Prince And Saidiya Hartman, Carolina Hinojosa
Subversive Cartography: Teaching Mary Prince And Saidiya Hartman, Carolina Hinojosa
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830
This chapter utilizes Hartman’s methodology of retrieval to create a map1 in StoryMap JS2 (“the map” or “this map”) that analyzes multiple geographic spaces in The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave Narrative and Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. The map is an archive or a witness to some of the geographical spaces Mary Prince lived (and was sold) as an enslaved woman seeking freedom and the places in which Saidiya Hartman has conducted research or visited in Ghana as a “free” woman. Layering the past over present creates a …
Along And Against The Grain: Close Reading The History Of Mary Prince, Kristina Huang
Along And Against The Grain: Close Reading The History Of Mary Prince, Kristina Huang
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830
Due to the highly mediated conditions of its production, The History of Mary Prince presents a challenge to New Critical methods of reading that are frequently taught in undergraduate literature classrooms. Without questioning the British abolitionists’ textual representation of Prince’s experiences, readers unfamiliar with the historical conditions for slave narratives may attribute the publication’s sentimentalism and representations of violence as direct expressions of Prince. This essay mobilizes close reading towards contrary ends: I throw the editor’s (Thomas Pringle’s) paratextual material, particularly the Preface, under scrutiny by close reading its insistence on transparency and symmetry between the first-person narrative and Prince …
Mary Prince’S Undisciplining Lessons: Counter-Narrative And Testimonio In The History, Kerry Sinanan
Mary Prince’S Undisciplining Lessons: Counter-Narrative And Testimonio In The History, Kerry Sinanan
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830
This essay discusses teaching The History of Mary Prince at a Hispanic Serving Institution via Ethnic Studies praxis. It develops Nicole Aljoe’s definition of Prince’s narrative as counter-story and testimonio and explores the undisciplining effects of reading Prince’s history as relevant to the lives of Borderlands students. To understand the multiple meanings of “undisciplining’ this essay draws on the theory of Sylvia Wynter and shows how Prince’s testimonio offers an alternative to Western epistemologies via communal resistance and resurgence. Several pedagogic tools are explored for teaching Prince in this way.
The Black Wanderer: Reading The Black Diaspora, Resistance, And Becoming In The History Of Mary Prince In The Classroom, Nicole Carr
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830
This paper examines The History of Mary Prince as a pedagogical tool for exploring complexities within the Black Diaspora. As Paul Gilroy’s articulations of the Black Atlantic inform my approach, Prince’s circuitous journey through the West Indies and England situates her process of becoming as one mired in longing and loss. Encouraging students to consider Prince as a wandering soul in search of not only freedom, but also solid familiar connections lays the foundation for merging her narrative with other enslaved Black people traversing countries and regions on ships against their will. Ample research material available on the survivors of …