Abolitionist Traces, Interimperial Contexts: Briton Hammon's Narrative (1760) in Cuba and in Print

Abstract

Abstract

By taking seriously interimperialist contexts, this article reinterprets Briton Hammon’s Narrative (1760), contesting, especially due to Hammon’s presence in Havana, Cuba, commonly accepted notions of canonicity across literary genres in the Americas. I argue that one must read this short piece against the grain of the US literary canon in which Hammon’s Narrative has been canonized as “the first slave narrative,” almost exclusively in an anglophone setting. I offer the term “abolitionist traces” as literary method to address how Hammon’s multilinguistic and interimperial contexts become suppressed due to the conditions of the text’s publication by Green and Russell and advertisement in pro-British and proslavery periodical Boston Post-Boy. Rather than concede that this New England colonial context determines the text’s ultimate scope, I read a revolutionary Caribbean context alongside Hammon by way of the Hispanophone Havana, where Hammon spends eight and a half years in bondage and in service. Putting forth the Cuban context uncovers how Hammon’s Narrative does not subscribe to the common tropes of anglophone slave narratives, particularly “writing into being” and freedom as teleological finale. I stress the limitations of imposing national and monolinguistic frameworks for interpreting texts, such as prison writing and slave narratives, that take up bondage as key themes. Using Hammon’s Narrative as example, this analysis forwards the notion that every singular context must be multiplied into plural contexts to account for overlapping geographies, politics, and lived experiences. Moving across and against US exceptionalism is vital to an abolitionist method of interpretation, especially in making sense of how past bondage carries into our present, offering traces for resisting captivity when such resistance seems sparse.