Black Atlantic Resistance of Enslaved Women in Robert Wedderburn’s The Horrors of Slavery (1824) and Mary Prince’s History of Mary Prince (1831)

Abstract

This article contends that Prince’s History and Wedderburn’s Horrors stage female enslaved resistance against commodification and dehumanisation. There are significant differences between texts; for instance, Wedderburn’s radical pamphlet was written by a free Black Atlantic man, and Prince’s His-tory is the narrative of an enslaved Caribbean woman, told to and edited by white evangelicals. However, both display a dialectics of commodification and liberation. Prince’s standing up to her sexual abuser, her strategic moves towards emancipation, and her eventual escape from her abusive enslavers in England demonstrate her constant resistance. This practical resistance corresponds to narrative resistance as she indicts the atrocities of her enslavers, whose identity is thinly disguised. By contrast, the free black man Wedderburn invokes and places himself within matrilineal female Black Atlantic resistance traditions. These range from his enslaved rebellious mother, Rosan-na, to his enslaved maternal grandmother, ‘Talkee Amy’. Wedderburn juxtaposes matriarchal cultures of African diasporic resistance with capitalist patriarchal oppression, epitomised by his white paternal family line of en-slavers and sexual abusers.