Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, course: Narratives in Colonial America (SS 2007), 23 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: The very first look on the front cover of Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African presents an uncommon picture, at least uncommon for the eighteenth century. This frontpiece shows an “indisputably African body in European dress” (Carretta Introduction xix). This could be seen as a potential indication of a so-called double consciousness as it was coined by William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963).In his introduction to Olaudah Equiano’s narrative, Vincent Carretta states that Equiano possesses such a double consciousness. Frank Kelleter also invokes this term in his discourse on Ethnic Self-Dramatization and Technologies of Travel in order to describe Equiano’s identity (cf. 73). Equiano was kidnapped as an eleven-year-old boy from Africa and sold into slavery. Not only did he embark on several voyages across the Atlantic (Middle Passage) and traveled to different British colonies but what is more, he embarked on a process of cultural assimilation which shaped his identity. This paper will focus on the question if the notion of double consciousness, which Du Bois coined in The Souls of Black Folk in 1903, can be applied unquestioningly to Equiano’s eighteenth-century narrative. Equiano may possess some kind of double consciousness but it is a less distinct one than described by Du Bois. Equiano’s double consciousness may flicker now and again and it certainly fulfills some of Du Bois’s criteria but yet it lacks the essence of Du Bois’s definition: the irreconcilability of two antagonistic identities. Therefore, it will be crucial to see how Equiano escaped the “dialectic two soul paradigm” and came to terms with his ancestral past and his newly-adopted European identity without ending up with an all too discordant self (Moses 188).First and foremost, the analysis requires a definition of Du Bois’s double consciousness which later on will be broken down into single elements so as to discuss in how far Equiano possesses a double consciousness. It will be key to analyze those scenes which either confirm or refute the existence of a double consciousness and display his affinity for a particular culture.
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