Cultural “Diaspora-ization” and The History of Mary Prince

First published in pamphlet form in 1831, Mary Prince's History is the first narrative of the life of a black woman to be published in Britain and one of the last examples of British slave narratives published before abolition in 1833. The History provides on the one hand a valuable historical record of a former slave called upon to bear irrefutable witness to “the horrors of slavery,” giving voice to the memories of the break-up of her family, endless toil, disease, physical and emotional brutality, and sexual exploitation. On the other hand, as an autobiographical retrospective account, slave narratives like Prince's have become recognized as key contributors to the emergence of collective identities forged in the crucible of transatlantic slavery: African-American, Afro-Caribbean, Black Atlantic, and African diaspora. Stuart Hall neatly summarized the transnational and cross-cultural processes at work in the formulation of these identities, writing:

Slave narratives reveal this process of what Hall terms “diasporaization” in the fragmentation and hybridity of the black (writing) subject. Prince's History, like many slave narratives, is not a straightforward memoir of her experiences of enslavement. Because Mary Prince is unable to authorize the story of her own experience, her History must rely heavily on the textual interventions of her editor, Thomas Pringle, who is called upon to provide an irreproachable authority, who can verify and lend credence to her eyewitness claims, and who can himself testify to her character as an upright Christian woman. As a Christian, male abolitionist, Pringle authorizes Prince's voice, and even her body, to speak the truth of slavery. As William L. Andrews summarizes, “Slave narratives usually required a variety of authenticating devices, such as character references and reports of investigations into the narrator's slave past (almost always written by whites), so that the slave's story might become operative as a linguistic act.”