923 ELH 81 (2014) 923–954 © 2014 by The Johns Hopkins University Press FILIATION TO AFFILIATION: KINSHIP AND SENTIMENT IN EQUIANO’S INTERESTING NARRATIVE BY RAMESH MALLIPEDDI In his introduction to the landmark 1967 edition of Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography, Paul Edwards observes that Equiano shares with Daniel Defoe “the directness and simplicity of narrative style.” 1 Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) has been, for more than two centu- ries, the acknowledged generic precursor of Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789), ever since the publication of An Inquiry Concerning the Intellectual and Moral Faculties, and Literature of Negroes (1810), where the French abolitionist Henri Grégoire emphasized the extent to which Scripture shapes these two narratives. 2 But for Edwards, the resemblance between Equiano and Defoe’s eponymous hero lies not in their belief in providence or extreme religiosity, as it did for Grégoire and other critics, but in their restrained, unostentatious, carefully- calibrated acts of self-exposure. Like Crusoe, Equiano “as a rule puts no emotional pressure on the reader other than that which the situa- tion itself contains—his language does not strain after our sympathy,” and he “makes no effort to capture our sympathies sentimentally by presenting himself as a man persistently ill-treated by an irredeemably wicked world.” Indeed, such “quiet avoidance of emotional display produces many of the best passages in the book.” 3 Writing at a time when the status of slave narrative as literature remained uncertain, when the sentimental was defined in opposition to the literary and equated with the trivial, Edwards downplays emotional excess in favor of rational restraint to emphasize the affinities between Equiano’s newly-rediscovered slave narrative and Defoe’s canonical spiritual auto- biography—the locus classicus of eighteenth-century formal realism. This well-meaning attempt, however, overlooks the radically divergent strategies of self-presentation in these two texts: while Crusoe scrupu- lously reconstructs his twenty-four years of solitary life on a desert island with studied detachment and calculating taciturnity, rarely divulging any intimate details of his private life, Equiano recounts his ordeals— separation from kith and kin in childhood, crossing the Atlantic as a captive, indignities of bondage during adolescence, abuses endured