Mary Prince's The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself, transcribed and edited by white abolitionists in England in 1831, is the first narrative by an enslaved Black woman in the Americas-published thirty years before Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. KEYWORDS: race, slave narrative, Black skin, Blackness, whiteness, Caribbean, gender/feminism For Prince the form of the slave narrative becomes, rather than constraining and disciplining, a platform for articulating embodied Black knowledge and epistemological expertise. In doing so, her narrative makes a claim to a racial characteristic of Black feeling as different from, and superior to, white feeling. Her History, written the same year that Nat Turner's Rebellion took place in the United States and just two years before a decree of emancipation across the British Caribbean and the entire British empire, speaks of Black skin as vulnerable and permeable, but also as emotionally and morally intelligent. This article argues that Prince unsettles dominant critical practices in nineteenth-century literary studies and Black studies in her unsentimental description of laboring and subjected Black skin. Abstract: Mary Prince's The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself, transcribed and edited by white abolitionists in England in 1831, was an early entry into the slave narrative genre, the first for an enslaved Black woman in the Americas.
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