New Voices: Iziah Topete

In this talk, I begin with the motivation for a philosophical study of the abolition of slavery in the Atlantic world. I briefly outline figures in the abolitionist movements in Britain, Haiti, and the United States, but the talk focuses on the Igbo writer Olaudah Equiano and how he develops a concept of equality in chapter five of The Interesting Narrative (1789). Through narration and literature, drawing on poetry by John Bicknell and Thomas Day, the book of Exodus, and the figure of Beelzebub from John Milton's Paradise Lost, Equiano interprets the enslaved in the Caribbean as subjected to arbitrary power across the axes of punishment, sex, and dominion. For Equiano, Caribbean slavery is a state of war, one in which enslavers must always fear being outdone by the strategies of the enslaved. As a whole, I argue that Equiano's account of equality in chapter five overturns tropes about the ‘slavishness’ of slaves found in the Roman tradition and in Rousseau.

Iziah Topete is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Boston College. He specializes in Africana philosophy and Latin American philosophy, and his work has engaged political questions about race, slavery, and liberty.

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