"Good Works He Had None": Methodism and Antislavery in Equiano's Interesting Narrative

Abstract: This article rethinks the relationship between religious experience and narrative form in Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative (1789). It argues that Equiano's Methodist rebirth compensates for an autobiographical problem immanent to his retelling of his enslavement and freedom—the problem of how to account for his present identity through past actions that no longer appear to have produced it. Through conversion, Equiano develops a faculty of divine hindsight that allows him to narrate his unconverted actions as irrelevant to his final state, empowering him to enter the antislavery movement through a form of political agency outside of the demand for total self-mastery.