Marrant’s Indians: Revisiting the Talking Book Trope from the Perspective of Black and Indigenous Encounter

Abstract This article revisits the literary history of the talking book trope and argues that it should be read as a trope of Black and Indigenous encounter. By focusing on the use of the trope in the writings of John Marrant and Ottobah Cugoano, I highlight how Indigenous people were crucial to early formulations of Black literature and Black political thought. By using the talking book trope, Marrant and Cugoano intervened in a New World literary history centered around representations of European and Indigenous American encounter. However, Marrant and Cugoano do not simply slot themselves into the dominant role historically occupied by the white European; in fact, by turning a trope of European and Indigenous encounter into a trope of Black and Indigenous encounter, they fundamentally change the way the trope works. The logic of power and negation the trope has historically formalized—master/slave, colonizer/colonized—doesn’t translate when the principal actors are Black and Indigenous. From its inception, colonial literature could only conceive of Black and Indigenous people in relationship to Europeans. When Marrant and Cugoano insisted on an American history that centered Black and Indigenous encounters, they challenged one of the constitutive silences of the colonial literary tradition.