Citation: Greensword, S.N.-K. Olaudah Equiano and the Anti-Ethnography of Blackness. Humans 2024, 4, 400–408. https:// doi.org/10.3390/humans4040026 Academic Editor: William Jankowiak Received: 26 August 2024 Revised: 14 November 2024 Accepted: 21 November 2024 Published: 3 December 2024 Copyright: © 2024 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). Essay Olaudah Equiano and the Anti-Ethnography of Blackness Sylviane Ngandu-Kalenga Greensword John V. Roach Honors College, Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, TX 76109, USA; s.n.greensword@tcu.edu Abstract: This essay considers the abolitionist narrative, The Life of Olaudah Equiano, through the anthropological lens of ethnography. Equiano’s account, though not without controversy, contributes to the evolution of an African cultural consciousness that would span across multiple continents. In that sense, while this autobiography seems to follow the literary pattern of its contemporary slave narratives, it is also countercultural and qualifies as “anti-ethnography”. The review presented here focuses on two sections of Equiano’s work: (1) the Afrocentric account of Ibo culture and (2) the cultural commentary regarding enslavement in the Americas. For each section, Equiano’s deviation from the traditional slave narrative is highlighted and analyzed. Keywords: Equiano; ethnography; slave narratives; cultural anthropology 1. Introduction Although still “uncanonized” [1], Olaudah Equiano’s narrative is considered one of the precursors in international abolitionist literature. The events recorded in his autobiography spread across four continents, and for each location, an ethnographic account (snapshot of an entire cultural group at a given time) is provided. The text, therefore, resembles a chologist’s travel account where the narrator has the particularity of being not only black but African. Ethnographic narratives are characterized by a specific feature: a snapshot of an entire culture at a given time. They include the descriptions of institutions such as political organization, sexual (courtship and marriage) structures, religion, and economy. Ethnographies were first written by people from an alien culture, commonly to further a given political or economic agenda. For example, the Spaniards who would write about Natives in America were funded and sent by their government. In these narratives, colonizers and Western researchers often played God when writing about the soon-to-be colonized people, not only to belittle their humanity by exacerbating their otherness and exoticism but also because they would control the colonized better if they knew every aspect of their lives. Inversely, as they wrote about their own people in Africa or on the plantation in the Americas, black writers demonstrated authority over themselves: they showed that blacks have the ability to evaluate their own condition and express their evaluation orally and in writing. Furthermore, anthropological theory states that when an ethnographic account is written by someone from the culture that is being described, the effect tends not to be to belittle the culture but quite the contrary. In that sense, most emic ethnographies of life in Africa or on the plantation in early black literature are actually “anti-ethnographies” as they go against the Western, “Enlightened” ethnographic trends of the time. Such a dialectical opposition to the literary promotion of the “law, institutions and contracts” [2] of this Enlightenment-era can be related to what Deleuze calls “Nomad Thought”, that is, the Nietzschean “counter-Enlightenment culture” [3]. Narratives such as Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography fall within this “nomad thought” category, and the counter-current notions of black dignity and injustice done to blacks worldwide are communicated via the very structure of the narrative. Another counter- discipline consideration of Equiano’s narrative can be found in the work of Keeler (2021), who argues that the autobiography constitutes an anthropological account of Ibo cosmolo- gies where interactions with nonhuman animals are central to the culture. In Keller’s Humans 2024, 4, 400–408. https://doi.org/10.3390/humans4040026 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/humans