39 pages • 1 hour read
Stephanie E. SmallwoodSaltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2007A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Key Figures
Stephanie E. Smallwood
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses slavery and abuse. This guide uses the word “slave” in quotation only.
Smallwood is an associate professor of history and comparative history of ideas at the University of Washington. Smallwood received her undergraduate degree from Columbia University and her doctorate from Duke University. Published in 2007, Saltwater Slavery was adapted from Smallwood’s 1999 dissertation “Saltwater Slavery” to coincide with the anniversary of the “Slave Trade Act,” first passed in 1807. This act ended the trade of enslaved people between British colonies, although it did not abolish enslavement in these areas or emancipate enslaved people. With this full text, Smallwood aims to “[bring] the people aboard slave ships to life as subjects in American social history” (3). Her goal in the text is to resist The Dehumanizing Effects of Commodification and counteract The Historical Silencing of Marginalized Voices.
Olaudah Equiano
Olaudah Equiano (1745-1797) was an abolitionist and writer of a popular autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789). This text details his life from his childhood in what is now known as Nigeria, to being trafficked to the Caribbean and enslaved, to achieving liberation. Equiano’s account is a crucial source for Saltwater Slavery because it provides a first-person, subjective view of the enslavement system. Smallwood describes his writing as “poetic,” juxtaposing his perspective with accounts of enslaved people in the sterile, prosaic records of the Royal African Company, which often describe people like objects.
Equiano’s first-person description of the ship on which he was trafficked provides insight into Establishing Social Structure and Community Amid Forced Displacement. While official records provide context for this process, Equiano’s account conveys how it felt; Smallwood quotes his use of the term “hollow,” from which she infers that the experience of the people being trafficked was devoid of anything with which they were familiar and onto which they could project meaning.
‘Sibell
'Sibell was a woman who was trafficked from Africa and enslaved in Barbados. Smallwood gives an account of her story, which conveys how The Historical Silencing of Marginalized Voices has been both enacted and rectified. ‘Sibell told her story to a white man named John Ford, which highlights that many enslaved people did not have the Western education or the means to record their own stories. While someone did record her story, it is filtered through the lens of a white man, who did have the means to keep records. He records her specific diction—Smallwood quotes him transcribing her phrasing, “de long House” (204)—which suggests both John Ford’s attempt to convey her story authentically but also his view that she did not speak standardized English to be transcribed with standardized spelling.
Smallwood focuses on ‘Sibell’s attempts to come to terms with the Middle Passage and reconcile “the African past and American present” (207). This focus conveys deeply human attempts to achieve “full narrative closure” in the face of trauma and make sense of being torn away from everything one knows (207). ‘Sibell’s feelings about what happened to her reinforce Smallwood’s point about The Dehumanizing Effects of Commodification: Enslavers attempted to ignore the pain, suffering, and human needs of those whom they enslaved for financial gain.
