The Christian Imagination by Willie James Jennings

Equiano learned to read and write on the small space of a ship and therefore a geographic instability and forced mobility undergirded his intellectual accomplishment. Coupled to this geographic instability, the central resource of his accomplished literacy was the Bible, which played a pivotal role in translating "The African" into English vernacular Christianity and into its domesticity. Reading and writing not only introduced him to a New World but also set him on a path toward a new kind of social performance. Vincent Carretta identifies this as Equiano's desire to be recognized as a gentleman: "[Equiano] subtly and rather quickly offers himself to his audience as the definition of a true gentleman, ‘almost an Englishman. " [1] The African's need for belonging culminated not simply in a nationalist performance but in the presentation of a class consciousness, that of an English gentleman. Equiano exposes to his readers the assimilating character of literacy in the colonialist moment [2]

[1]: Vincent Carretta, Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 328. Equiano described himself as "almost an Englishman" in Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African: Written by Himself, vol. 1 (London: T. Wilkins, 1789), 132.