Below is an excerpt from an article, “Mary Prince’s legacy gets the spotlight in new book with help from this Northeastern professor,” published by Northeastern Global News on a new Cambridge Companion to Mary Prince, edited by Northeastern Professor Nicole Aljoe.
“When ‘The History of Mary Prince’ was published in England in 1831, it set off a firestorm.
Prince’s account of her experience as an enslaved woman in the Caribbean was the first of its kind to be published in Great Britain. It arrived at a time when the abolitionist movement was gaining more and more traction, and the vivid, brutal detail and direct prose of Prince’s story added fuel to the movement. It spawned two libel lawsuits, both of which Prince testified in, and sold out its first three printings within a year.
However, in time, Prince’s narrative was relegated to the dusty shelves of history by literary scholars who deemed it less authentic because it was dedicated by Prince, not written in her own hand. Now, with ‘The Cambridge Companion to Mary Prince,’ a new edited volume of scholarship focused entirely on Prince’s narrative, a Northeastern University professor hopes to thrust this landmark text back into the spotlight.
‘She documents that she has these really awful, terrible experiences but still at every opportunity she’s trying to better herself,’ says Nicole Aljoe, an English professor at Northeastern and editor of the new Cambridge Companion. ‘She’s trying to achieve liberty in some way, shape or form.'”
The article goes on to describe how Prince’s book supports scholarship across disciplines, detailing how:
“Sarah Connell, associate director of the NULab for Digital Humanities and Computational Social Science and a Northeastern Ph.D. recipient, used Prince’s text as a way to explore the thorny questions involved with digitally picking apart historical texts.
‘I have all of these hard-edged tools that are very good at doing exactly what you tell them to do,’ Dr. Connell says. ‘But this is a text that doesn’t really let you sit comfortably with any of those precise formalisms. It doesn’t let you say, ‘I know how to count places because I know what a place is.’ It’s challenging those sorts of perspectives immediately.'”
You can read the full article from Northeastern Global News here: “Mary Prince’s legacy gets the spotlight in new book with help from this Northeastern professor.”
