Henry Louis Gates, Jr., concludes his preface toThe Slave’s Narrativewith the remark that “[John] Blassingame’s work relates to our work in [literary] criticism, in an ideal relation of text to context” (vii). This, after already dedicating the book to Blassingame, in honor of what Gates and his collaborator, the late Charles T. Davis,¹ termed “the revolution in historiography ... effected in [Blassingame’s]The Slave Community."² To state the obvious, Gates wants to make a point in emphasizing the importance of Blassingame’s work on slave narratives. Or rather, he wants to make two points. One is that since the...

The statement that “the slave narrative represents the attempt of blacks towrite themselves into being” is the motto for a deft and profoundly elegant critique of Western modernity’s insistence on the putting-together of reflection and the grapheme. Its deftness is in making understanding the connectedness of writing and Being a prerequisite for reading slave narratives, and then reading slave narratives as initiating the sustained African American critique of that connectedness. Its elegance is that the profoundness of the critique is in direct proportion to the fundamental profundity of Western modernity’s discovering the authentic trace of liberated autoreflective consciousness only...

Reading the inception of a negative history in slave narratives results from a particular endeavor of African American theory to map the ways in which the narratives mediate “the distance between text and reality” (Gates,Black Literature and Literary Theory5), by rigorously engaging in the nature and function of the narratives’ language: that is, by participating in the coding/decoding structures of signification specific to the texts, which constitute the reality of mediation. Such an endeavor, while attentive to the problematic issues of modes of representation, cannot be justified on the basis of a theory grounded in representation. The way in...

Among the first American scholars to grasp the importance of African Arabic was William Brown Hodgson, who was also one of America’s first orientalists and founder of the American Oriental Society, as well as a founding member of the American Ethnological Society. Hodgson had extensive experience in Africa and the Muslim world as an official representative of the U.S. government. From 1826 to 29, he was with the U.S. consulate in Algiers, and for two years, 1832-34, he was the dragoman to the U.S. legation, Constantinople. After that, he returned to Algiers and served from 1841 to 42 as the...

An extreme, and to that extent convenient, example of heterography’s signaling the lawlessness of linguistic referentiality occurs with a somewhat well known New World African-Arabic text which both Hodgson and Dwight make reference to, but in all probability never read. It is the purported autobiographical diary of one Ben Ali, who was an intimate of Couper’s Tom. The first published reference to Ben Ali, of Sapelo Island, Georgia, occurs in the letter that was discussed in chapter 5, which Couper sent to Hodgson in 1839. At the end of that letter Couper writes:

Mr. Spalding of Sapelo has, among his...

The Ben Ali manuscript is enclosed in a small leather bag, secured by an attached leather strap (plates 1 and 2). The bag’s color is a creamy tan, and its untanned side is facing outward, with the tanned side protecting the text. There is no title page or any discernible declaration of a title; neither is there any signature. The text is written on both sides of rather thin paper. The pages of the manuscript are bound together by string. There is no information on the history of the text’s binding; whether it was done by Ben Ali or Goulding...

What is most threatening about the heterography of Ben Ali’s manuscript is its foreclosing on the displacement of heterogeneity outside of the circuit of linguistic referentiality. Through its signs’ refusal to become transparent, the manuscript exposes the necessity of any arbitrarily definitive reading to be in displacing the indeterminacy of referentiality, and the obfuscation of that materiality it cannot displace. This is the same indeterminacy that provoked Kant to designation and hypotyposis.

Whichever way the text is turned, Ben Ali’s manuscript confronts its would-be reader with the figure of the reader readingBen Ali's Diary;which is to say, of...