Mary Prince, Slavery, and Print Culture in the Anglophone Atlantic World by Juliet Shields (review)

Reviewed by: Mary Prince, Slavery, and Print Culture in the Anglophone Atlantic World by Juliet Shields Shelby Johnson (bio) Mary Prince, Slavery, and Print Culture in the Anglophone Atlantic World juliet shields Cambridge University Press, 2021 80 pp. In Mary Prince, Slavery and Print Culture in the Anglophone Atlantic World, Juliet Shields locates The History of Mary Prince within a broad network of immigrant writing across Britain's imperial periphery, [End Page 525] including Canada, South Africa, and Scotland. Shields engages specifically with the three figures who collaborated in producing The History of Mary Prince: Susanna Strickland (Moodie), who transcribed Prince's oral history; Thomas Pringle, who edited The History; and Prince herself, who provided an account of her experiences of enslavement in Bermuda, Grand Turk, and Antigua. Broadly, Shields's work situates The History of Mary Prince in diverse transatlantic settings and print circulations, with specific chapters titled "Mary Prince in the Romantic Atlantic World," "From Slave Narrative to Migrant Narrative," and "Representing Slavery in the Colonies and the Metropolis." By attending to questions of authority and voice, Shields's objectives are twofold. Mary Prince, Slavery and Print Culture in the Anglophone Atlantic World seeks to decenter Romantic conceptions of authorship, where aesthetically unified texts are the creative act of an autonomous writer, to instead center the collaborative processes through which The History appeared. In this, Shields implicitly builds on prior critical interventions on Caribbean narratives of slavery, including Nicole Aljoe's contention in Creole Testimonies: Slave Narratives from the British West Indies (Palgrave, 2012) that collaborative writing on Caribbean slavery is shaped by significant differentials in power: "Every single West Indian slave narrative is explicitly mediated in some way—by a white transcriber, editor or translator" (14). In addition, Shields traces the influences of Prince and Black Atlantic discourses on the emergences of a white Anglophone Atlantic world, where British immigrants to distant places drew from figures like Prince to improvise conceptions of belonging in settlements far from Britain's metropolitan center—a claim I will return to momentarily. Shields explores these cross currents, for one, through depictions of homesickness in Prince, Strickland Moodie, and Pringle's writings (12–14, 22–33). In one sense, Shields's focus on networks of influence reflects the aims of the Cambridge Elements series Eighteenth-Century Connections, which publishes scholarship that may not otherwise have a venue in traditional academic genres (too long for a journal article, too short for a conventional monograph). The series makes current research accessible on digital platforms, enabling readers, in this case, not only to engage with the vexed print conditions of The History but also to visualize through maps and images the transatlantic movements of Prince, as well as Pringle and Strickland Moodie, who immigrated to South Africa and Canada, respectively. [End Page 526] For Shields, attending to the materialities of movement—for both peoples and texts—has acute implications for literary studies: "Beginning with fixed parameters, whether national, temporal, or literary historical, predetermines which writers we can study and which we can ignore. Following the movements of writers who lived and worked transnationally allows us to trace literary connections that reveal the contingency of the parameters through which we organize literary study," not least the parameters that conventionally organize Romanticist inquiry. While I appreciate Shields's destabilization of the very terms of literary study ("author," "text"), as well as the nation-centered analytics so often predominant in the field, I have reservations about several aspects of the work's architecture, including the critical weight given to "migrancy" as a comparative lens. Although Shields acknowledges that Prince's experiences of mobility are profoundly different from "those of white settlers and sojourners," the geography of textual influence drawn in Mary Prince, Slavery and Print Culture in the Anglophone Atlantic World is rooted in a conception that "coerced and free migration form a continuum; they are not stark oppositions" (3). Prince's lived experiences of migrancy may share some superficial similarities with Strickland Moodie or Pringle's, but her Blackness conditions her itinerancy in a way that is utterly incommensurate with white settler immigration. Put simply, the fungibility of Black flesh under slavery exceeds a spectrum of either...

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