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Chapter 1 - The History of Mary Prince and the Web of Black Atlantic Print Culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 April 2025

By
Kerry Sinanan
Edited by
Nicole N. Aljoe
Nicole N. Aljoe
Affiliation:
Northeastern University, Boston
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Summary

This chapter reads Mary Prince’s History within a Black Atlantic context of Black print and activism to connect the abolitionist work of enslaved and free Black people across the Caribbean, North America, and Britain. Mary Prince’s testimony creates abolitionist futures too, linking past and present through transatlantic Black networks of resistance and print. The legacies of abolitionist arguments made by Prince, Belinda Sutton, Olaudah Equiano, Grace Jones, Ottobah Cugoano, and many others are shown to be of vital importance today as we seek pathways out of ongoing racial capitalist violence.

Keywords

Black Atlanticprint networkspetitionsBlack freedom
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Companion to Mary Prince , pp. 18 - 36
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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References

Works Cited

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Further Reading

Fuentes, Marisa J. Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women Violence and the Archive. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Great Britain. High Court of Admiralty, John Haggard, and William Scott. The Judgment of the Right Hon. Lord Stowell, Respecting the Slavery of the Mongrel Woman, Grace, On an Appeal from the Vice-Admiralty Court of Antigua, Michaelmas Term, 1827. London, Printed by W. Benning [etc.], 1827.Google Scholar
Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Edited by Ellis, R. J., Oxford University Press, 2016.Google Scholar
Shields, Juliet. Mary Prince, Slavery, and Print Culture in the Anglophone Atlantic World. Cambridge University Press, 2021.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sinanan, Kerry. “Mary Prince’s Back and Her Critique of Anti-slavery Sympathy.” Studies in Romanticism, vol. 61, no. 1, 2022, pp. 67–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sinanan, Kerry. “The ‘Slave’ as Cultural Artifact: The Case of Mary Prince.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, vol. 49, no. 1, 2020, pp. 69–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stovall, Tyler E. White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea. Princeton University Press, 2021.Google Scholar
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, and Carby, Hazel V.. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Beacon Press, 2015.Google Scholar

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