KARINA WILLIAMSON (ed.). Contrary Voices: Representations of West Indian Slavery,1657–1834. Pp. xii + 520. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2008.Paper, £28.95.

Karina Williamson’s anthology Contrary Voices is, as the book jacket claims, unprecedented in anthologies on slavery. Although there have been a number of recent ones on slavery in the English speaking world—including a six-volume collection from Pickering and Chatto—none attempt such comprehensiveness. Indeed, the range of texts here is staggering, running the gamut from widely reprinted texts (Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative) to ephemera including unpublished manuscriptletters, excerpts of legal testimony and the surviving records of slave songs. Williamson,inarguably, has assembled a bibliographic treasure trove; her anthology will introduce students to the full scope of texts on British West Indian slavery published between 1657 and 1834. Indeed, even the most ardent scholar of the archive of British West Indian slavery will be introduced to new texts and new aspects of long familiar ones. Of course, given the subject matter, and the format, few readers will attempt to read the book in toto; to do so is to be plunged into a relentlessly disturbing, disheartening world, despite the evidence of the spirit, survival skills and even the sense of humour of the enslaved. Indeed, most disturbing may be the defences of slavery offered, especially the repeated dismissiveness of the notion that Africans could even desire to be free.

Although the sheer volume of texts covered can lead to a numbing effect, there is nonetheless much to be learned from the relentless onslaught. The agenda of each writer is brought out by the sense of the rhetoric of slavery that emerges from the whole. This is salutary in particular because it seems to be accidental: Williamson’s principle of selection is to favour ‘writings based on first hand experience or observation of the West Indies’ (p. 2). Williamson explains that ‘the present collection is more concerned with the sociology of slavery than with the political, economic, and ethical arguments advanced for and against it’ (p. 2). The sociology of slavery here means, primarily, lived experiences of slavery, ranging from slave holiday celebrations to overseers’ accounts of plantation disciplinary regimes. Exceptions are made for texts that became overwhelmingly influential; Richard Steele’s version of the ‘Inkle and Yarico’ story is here explicitly for that reason. Nonetheless, Williamson is as little interested in tracing literary tropes about slavery as in the rhetorical nuances of the struggle between abolitionists and the West India Interest. She does comment in brief headnotes on the known politics of the authors, but these comments are not always reliable or convincing; John Collins may not have

been involved with either abolition or the West India Interest, as she mentions, but his poem denouncing ‘the despoiler of man’ is not ambiguous politically.

Her commitment to a sociological view of slavery does produce some wonderful results, particularly in her section on slave songs. Here, in a loosely essayistic format, she describes and explores the extant records of songs actually sung by slaves, as well as imitations of such songs. She does an excellent job in this section of crisply presenting the available evidence about the origins of circumstances in which the songs were transcribed (or created) and allowing the reader to make as much or as little of them as they wish. The story behind the song ‘Take Him to the Gulley’ is particularly arresting: a sick slave who was left to die by his master, and who survived when fellow slaves took pity on him and offered him clothing and shelter, found himself reclaimed by the master who had originally abandoned him. The story appears in multiple places in the anthology and is cross-referenced through footnotes.

The anthology is certainly excellent as a gathering of texts that offer insight into the sociology of British West Indian slavery in the century and a half covered here, but the decision to shy away from explicit engagement with political rhetoric and literary tropes, combined with the slenderness of the each selection, leads to some troubling effects. For instance, Aphra Behn claims in Oroonoko to have visited Surinam and to have based her novel on actual observations, but it is far from clear that she knew a royal slave there, or for that matter, that she ever in fact went to the colony. Williamson, however, offers—in a section marked ‘Resistance and Rebellion’—a brief snatch of the novel in which Oroonoko rallies his fellow slaves to rebel, using a seventeenth-century aristocratic rhetoric of honour. Williamson does not mention that Oroonoko recants his position once the rebellion fails, coming to feel ‘ashamed of what he had done, in endeavoring to make those free, who were by nature slaves’. Indeed, her headnote emphasises that Behn’s work was based on personal experience, despite the uncertainty of this claim. Oroonoko certainly deserves a place in such an anthology, but it would be best marked explicitly as a fictional text and described in terms of its vast influence throughout the long eighteenth century—in the endless adaptations and allusions it inspired—rather than presented as a first-hand document of slave rebellion. Perhaps Williamson felt compelled to include Behn—she explains the paucity of female authors in her collection by citing Moira Ferguson’s claim that ‘ ‘‘most white women’s writings about slavery had no basis in personal experience’’ ’ (p. 4), but this does not explain exclusion of Janet Schaw and Lady Nugent’s journals (both of whom are mentioned in Ferguson’s 1992 study of slavery in British women’s writing, Subject to Others). The extreme brevity of all the selections raises similar questions of context throughout. Williamson has not indicated the full page counts of the original texts,

which would have been very helpful in grasping how much of each text is represented. Several texts and authors appear in the anthology multiple times, under different thematic headings, making them seem particularly authoritative. Matthew Lewis’ Journal of a West India Proprietor (1834) appears in two selections and is repeatedly cited in the ‘Songs’ essays; similarly, Bryan Edwards appears in three selections and is cited in others. Both were viewed as moderates on slavery in their own time, but both need to be interpreted with great care; each had a complex agenda regarding slavery, but neither was without an agenda.

Ultimately, this is a book that one would like to see included in every decent college or university library. Its range and suggestiveness in a single volume make it a wonderful place to get oriented in the sea of original texts on British West Indian slavery. However, one must also hope that its readers will find their way to more complete, and more deeply contextualised, versions of the texts of which it offers such intriguing samples.

GEORGE E. BOULUKOS Southern Illinois University Carbondale doi:10.1093/res/hgq053

Advance Access published on 22 November 2010

Downloaded from res.oxfordjournals.org by Richard Langer on February 24, 2011 Source: Boulukos, George E., Oxford Journals, November 22, 2010