“He says he is free”: Narrative Fragments and Self-Emancipation in West Indian Runaway Advertisements

ABSTRACTEnslaved Africans authored very few texts. Nevertheless, their capacity to resist dehumanization left an enduring imprint upon the documentary archive. This essay broadens the scope of abolitionist literature by examining the self-emancipatory efforts of runaway slaves as recorded in runaway advertisements printed in British West Indian newspapers in the Romantic era. When readers encounter literary fragments they seem especially willing to grant them narrative closure, as Philippe Laccoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Marjorie Levinson have argued about Romantic-era fragments. Read as a different order of Romantic fragment, West Indian runaway advertisements, which have received limited critical attention, can be read for narrative closure not in terms of form, but in social terms. To be clear, the intervention of reading runaway advertisements in this way makes coherent and visible an agency that pre-exists both the documentary inscription of the runaways and the critical recovery thereof. This ...