Transplanting English Plantations in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko

Aphra Behn's 1688 novel, Oroonoko, tells the story of “the royal slave,” in the subtitle's phrase, ostensibly an African prince captured by an English ship captain off the African coast and transported across the Atlantic into slavery in Surinam. Overlooked in this brutal, murderous, disme...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The global South 2016-10, Vol.10 (2), p.11-26
Main Author: Morrissey, Lee
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Colonies
Irish history
Irish literature
Novels
Parliaments
Plantations
Political revolutions
Reading
Slavery
Slaves
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Aphra Behn's 1688 novel, Oroonoko, tells the story of “the royal slave,” in the subtitle's phrase, ostensibly an African prince captured by an English ship captain off the African coast and transported across the Atlantic into slavery in Surinam. Overlooked in this brutal, murderous, dismembering finale is the violent role of an Irishman, “one Banister, a wild Irish Man.” This essay springs from a few simple questions: Who was this man, this Irish man, and what is he doing in Surinam, and in Behn's novel? The answers to those questions offer important points of access to the larger, contextual implications of Behn's novel—its relationship to British political developments more or less contemporary with its publication, its reflections on the comparatively late English emergence in the transatlantic slave trade, and the formal disjunctures within Behn's novel that reflect and highlight related tensions in plantation modernity.
ISSN:1932-8648
1932-8656
DOI:10.2979/globalsouth.10.2.02