Undoing the Plot: The Vengeance Narrative and Ventriloquism Across William Earle’s Obi, or The History of Three-Fingered Jack and Robert Wedderburn’s The Axe Laid to the Root

Addressing the problem of obscuring subaltern voices when writing about historical works, this essay introduces a guiding strategy so that scholars do not reproduce power structures of oppression. Turning to the radical works of abolitionist Robert Wedderburn, such as The Axe Laid to the Root (1817), the essay makes a case for reading such works within their discursive contexts, identifying a vector of racial ventriloquism in writings attributed to and affiliated with Wedderburn. Reexamining the trope of the racialized vengeance narrative along these lines, the essay traces how the spiritual practices and political insurrectionary forces of enslaved Africans throughout the diaspora were misrepresented in metropolitan literary texts like William Earle’s Obi, or The History of Three-Fingered Jack.