ABSTRACT
Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative follows the author as he occupies various subject positions, including sailor, illiterate heathen, lettered Christian, hairdresser, merchant, master, and commodity. Equiano adopts and critiques European ontological forms of feeling and speaking as he narrates his movement across the Atlantic world. Equiano does not simply become a speaking subject by attaining literacy but rather by undergoing a biopolitical and economic conversion that both produces his Narrative and leads to the imperial propositions he puts forth at its end. Two different logics of capital work on Equiano throughout his text: the first, a logic that fragments the body to compensate it for the loss of its parts, as applied to sailors and colonial officers who were compensated for the loss of eyes or legs, and a logic that creates a corporeal totality, allowing the body to be sold as one unit, as applied to chattel slaves. These logics shape the way he narrates his journey from slavery to freedom. His text narrates his transformation from solely “bare life” to an indeterminate space between good and human being; not quite a slave and not quite a citizen, Equiano illustrates an indeterminate space of subjectivity in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.
