William Snelgrave was the captain of an English slave ship. What is the point of the contrast the narrator draws between Imoinda and “London wives”?.What is the tone of this speech? How does it speak to an English audience?.

The English playwright and poet, William Congreve, contributed this epilogue to Southerne’s play. Thomas Southerne adapted Behn’s narrative for the stage. William Congreve, Epilogue to Oroonoko (1699) Oroonoko on the Stage

Selection: George Warren, An Impartial Description of Surinam Upon the Continent of Guiana in America with a History of Several Strange Beasts, Birds, Fishes, Serpents, Insects and Customs of That Colony, &c., 19-20, 23-24 (1667). The colony belonged, at this time, to the English, though the Dutch would later claim it. George Warren’s account of the colony of Surinam includes brief chapters on the climate, natural produce, animals, and, excerpted here, people: African slaves and Caribe Indians.

How are stories about slavery told and re-told across different literary genres, or types of writing?.

How do these representations contribute to critiques of English and European society?.

How is the violence of slavery portrayed in the documents? How are we supposed to feel about it?.

In what ways do these writers portray Africans and Native Americans as racial “others”-whether idealized or vilified-and in what ways do these writers try to emphasize universal human characteristics across race and culture?.

How do the documents define specific racial and cultural groups-West Africans, Native Americans, the English, other Europeans-in relation to each other?.

The documents that follow develop the context for Behn’s narrative and, more broadly, demonstrate how European writing on race, slavery, and colonialism evolved over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It suggests some of the ways that English people were beginning to think about racial and cultural difference and about their own role in colonization and the slave trade. The novel draws on popular forms of literature such as the aristocratic romance, the travel narrative, and social criticism. Aphra Behn published Oroonoko in 1688, a time when the Atlantic slave trade and African slavery in the Americas were becoming consolidated as a transnational, economic system.

Aphra behn novel