Title: “The Stranger and the Exile Who Is in Our Land within Our Gates”: Mary Prince as a Black British Immigrant
Abstract: The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave (1831) is not just a record of a Black woman's past life of enslavement in the West Indies, but also the story of the new life that she was beginning in England. Her book is the signal achievement of that new life. Published by the Anti-Slavery Society in England as part of its campaign to abolish slavery, it tells the story of Prince's life in order to produce both a scathing indictment of the cruelty and heartless greed of those who enslaved Blacks and an emphatic and moving statement about what freedom meant to a Black woman who had been enslaved. The narrative also documents and enacts, however, Prince's effort, faced with the increasing certainty that she would never be able to return as a free woman to her home and husband in Antigua, to create a place for herself as a free Black woman in England. Even as her autobiography helps us to understand the ways in which forced mobility and migration fractured the lives of enslaved Blacks in the Caribbean during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it also illustrates the role that culture, race, and poverty played in shaping the terms under which Blacks settled in Britain at this time.
Publication Year: 2020
Publication Date: 2020-10-21
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 1
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