History of Ideas

Prof. B. Harvey

READING/ANALYSIS TIP:

For you to understand our texts, you need to understand the historical-intellectual-cultural context they are enwrapped in or reflect; and you need to learn to pay close attention to revelatory moments in them. These typically involve some sort of tension or resolution of a crisis: an example would be those key paragraphs in Locke in which money transforms “common” ownership into inheritance and thus vast differences of wealth.

OVERVIEW LECTURE NOTES FOR EQUIANO: A MIX OF THREE GENRES (the form a story or treatise, etc., takes):

1) Captivity/slave narrative: Equiano’s is one of the first (F. Douglass’s is another). It should be understood in terms of what slavery might have meant for Igbo/(now) Nigerian natives, and what slavery/property means in a Western, post-Locke context. Locke says what is most fundamentally ours is our body and its labor--at the very same time Africans, as they are kidnapped, are being denied both: could intellectual history and real material history be more incongruous!

2) Spiritual autobiography/ conversion narrative: Equiano’s is a spiritual narrative, too. (Side note: the Protestant tradition dispenses with Catholic ritual/efficacy of sacraments/priestly intervention—it’s just you and your God. The individualism or egalitarianism of Protestantism leads to interiority . . . Romantic subjectivity.)

2) Ben Franklinesque story of self-made man, who rises thru own enterprise--emergence of Homo-economicus!

SOME REVIEW QUESTIONS:

--EQUIANO's ATTITUDE TOWARD HIS HOME/VILLAGE? (see 12-13 & 15; see 17 & 19)

--HIS INITIAL ATTITUDE TOWARDS HIS WHITE CAPTIVES? THEIR CULTURE? (see 38)

--DOES HIS ATTITUDE SEEM TO CHANGE? (see 47 & 76)

--WHAT MAKES E. MOST HAPPY? (see 102-103)

--POINT OF DEAD MAN ANECDOTE? (see 99-100)

--WHAT DO YOU MAKE OF THESE PASSAGES? 159 and 179