SOURCE: “The (De)Construction of the ‘Other’ in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano,” in Black Imagination and the Middle Passage, edited by Maria Diedrich, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Carl Pedersen, Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 47-56.

In the following essay, Benito and Manzanas examine the concept of the “other” in Olaudah Equiano's Narrative, pointing out that Equiano viewed the white man as the “other” against whom he struggled, while at the same time he sought to adopt white culture. According to the critics, this “crisscrossing of identities” creates an “uneasy balance in the authorial voice” of the work.

Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European travelers in remote regions of the world easily found new subjects for the position of “the other,” that elusive and mobile entity that constitutes the opposite of self. “The other” becomes a discursive concept upon which the so-called “civilized...