‘Poor Negro-Girl,’ ‘Little Black Boy’: Constructing Childhood in Eighteenth-Century Slave Narratives, Abolitionist Propaganda and Postcolonial Novels

Anne-Julia Zwierlein

doi:10.1515/zaa.2004.52.2.107

Abstract

This article examines how eighteenth-century black writers and white abolitionists used the image of the slave child for their respective political purposes. (Auto-)biographies written by and about slaves abducted as children from Africa such as The Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw (1772) and The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789) contrasted the ‘white’ bourgeois narrative of infantile development with a tale of loss and deprivation. Their conventional narrative patterns constructed Africa as a pastoral idyll; Rousseauian ideas of innate goodness were combined with the topos of the noble savage. White abolitionists, too, turned the black orphan child into a sentimental icon; examples can be found in the writings of James Montgomery, Ann Taylor, Thomas Clarkson, Laurence Sterne and William Blake. Eighteenth-century educational and colonial policies were articulated in markedly similar terms; infantile and lower-class “ignorance” was juxtaposed with the mental “darkness” of the colonial subject. The article ends with a look at a late-twentieth-century transformation of the ‘slave child’ motif, David Dabydeen’s novel A Harlot’s Progress (1999), which focuses on the figure of the black slave child in the second picture of William Hogarth’s eponymous cycle of paintings (1732). The novel discusses the problem of the narrative construction of ‘black childhood’ itself, rewriting the eighteenth-century sentimental tradition in postmodernist fashion

‘Poor Negro-Girl,’ ‘Little Black Boy’: Constructing Childhood in Eighteenth-Century Slave Narratives, Abolitionist Propaganda and Postcolonial Novels

Abstract

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