DAVID DABYDEEN’S A HARLOT’S PROGRESS

Abstract

This paper considers the slave narrative genre with attention to David Dabydeen’s novel A Harlot’s Progress (1999).Dabydeen provocatively suggests through his protagonist Mungo the ways in which diasporan slave narrators have struggled with issues of self‐representation. In so doing, he questions the ethics of 18th‐century editors and readers alongside contemporary authors who claim these writers as figureheads of black Britain.

Keywords:

• David Dabydeen
• A Harlot’s Progress
• Hogarth
• slave narrator
• representation
• Martin Carter
• black

Notes

1 Arguably, Seacole would have disputed this positioning. As Hughes notes, the epithet “black” “would have puzzled and even hurt her [ … ] The most she would admit to was being ‘yellow’, which came the closest to describing a complexion that was a blend of Creole and ‘Scotch’” (12).

2 There are also elements of other slave authors in his creation of Mungo; Ignatius Sancho, for example, was a butler to the Duke and Duchess of Montagu.

3 Paul Edwards and James Walvin suggest in their book Black Personalities in the Era of the Slave Trade that the reviser of Cugoano’s book may well have been Olaudah Equiano (57).

4 As “Britain” was a relatively new concept created by the Act of Union of 1707, the land that Thistlewood yearns for is a nostalgic older England.

5 Ironically, Dabydeen’s critique of the reader of works about slavery has implications for his own audience. In The Postcolonial Exotic (2001), Graham Huggan discusses what he calls “ethnic autobiographies”; such postcolonial texts, he suggests, “signal the possibility of indirect access to ‘exotic’ cultures whose differences are acknowledged and celebrated even as they are rendered amenable to a mainstream reading public” (155). Dabydeen’s novel may also be read as an ironic comment on this kind of writing. It is not, it would seem, simply visual art that has the potential to exploit black people; as Dabydeen implies in A Harlot’s Progress, written texts may also fuel the readers’ perceived desires for “exotic” stories about slavery.

6 Mercer’s particular focus here is on the work of Robert Mapplethorpe—most notably Black Males. As Mercer notes, “[i]t is as if, according to Mapplethorpe’s line of sight: Black + Male = Erotic/Aesthetic Object [ … ] The ‘essence’ of black male identity lies in the domain of sexuality” (173).

7 Another connection is, of course, Britain’s establishment of the colony of British Guiana in 1831.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Abigail Ward

Abigail Ward is Lecturer in Postcolonial Studies at Nottingham Trent University. She is working on a monograph on representations of slavery in selected works of Caryl Phillips, David Dabydeen and Fred D’Aguiar, and has published work on Phillips and Dabydeen. Forthcoming work includes an essay on D’Aguiar’s Bloodlines and a chapter on psychological formulations of the postcolonial in the Routledge Companion to Postcolonial Studies, ed. John McLeod (2007). Other research interests include visual representations of slavery and the ethics of memorializing this past.