Introduction

In 2022, the Instagram production company, Stelo.Stories, released an adaptation of the slave narrative, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written By Himself, as a film produced specifically for Instagram Stories. The narrative is retold across an 80-minute runtime in Equiano.Stories by having a fictional Equiano mimic the function of “stories” with short self-shot slice-of-life video clips from a smartphone perspective for the Instagram platform. This paper thus explores the dynamics of the author-function in the eighteenth-century slave narrative as it is adapted from a written form and medium to a cinematic form in Instagram stories and a digital medium of the Instagram platform, a new mode we will henceforth call Insta-film.
We argue that Equiano.Stories as an adaptation gives us a way to better appreciate Equiano’s “improvisational” engagement with Enlightenment ideas of authorship and subjecthood. Further, the adaptation brings out the subsumptive tendencies of the cybernetic medium with regard to the subject and the undermining of improvisation, which we take to be an integral part of creative and political acts. Building on the well-developed and discussed concept in adaptation studies of “hypertext,”1 we further consider its deferred yet resonant meaning found in the world of internet communications and in adaptations where written texts are transformed into a cybernetic form and medium. If hypertext functions as a governing protocol, Blackness emerges as the ungovernable excess of a logical system, whether centralized in language or decentralized in computation.  Noting that Equiano.Stories as Insta-film is a hypertext fiction, built by hypertext markup language, utilizing hypertext transfer protocol, and is itself a hypertext of Olaudah Equiano’s slave narrative, the protocological enclosures and governance of the text must be scrutinized to see if Equiano can still exceed in the extrarational breaks to remold the seemingly totalizing system, as he manages to do successfully in the slave narrative. Equiano.Stories – with the digital, hypertext form of its medium – largely fails to overcome the limitations of the medium. However, it shows interesting promises for Insta-film as a form in areas we explore. We elaborate on three instances in Equiano.Stories where the formal features come in conflict with the cybernetic tendencies of Instagram as a platform:  i) the algorithm-controlled breaks in Insta-stories and, hence, the Insta-film, ii) the Insta-film’s platform-sensitive engagement with what Jeroen Gerrits has called the virtual point of view, and iii) the protocological construction of Equiano’s image on the Insta-handle’s homepage. Doing so helps us notice the medium-based limitations and draw attention to formalist choices that put pressure on the medium’s totalizing tendencies. 

As will be seen, we underscore how the author-function in the written text has a complicated role in the tensions between European logocentric assumptions and African Freedmens’ survival through ironic play with these assumptions. We understand Equiano’s author-function not merely as moving through the presumptive elisions in a totalizing structure, but rather as an emergent property of the lateral encounter between Enlightenment thought and an improvising vitalist force which enacts change towards a totality as open set. Understood thus, we see an Equiano riffing off liberal subjecthood that’s crucial to 18th c author-function, and not one that “buys himself into”—in his case literally too—the ideology of the liberal author.  What our reading of Equiano.Stories emphasizes above all is the improvisational engagement that eighteenth-century Equiano had with narrative devices and tools of the colonial era. It is this spirit of improvisation that the adaptation exorcises in its becoming protocological. As will be seen, new logics govern such contemporary means of communication that, though feeling less unified and atomistic, nevertheless enclose possibilities for improvisational rupture to occur. As such, a critical reading of this adaptation allows further meditation on the limited affordances offered by Insta-film’s form and techne in addressing contemporary matters of racialization and colonial violence such as the often-filmed police murders of Black people.

The Logic (of) Gates: Tracing the Author-Function in the Adaptation

In this section, we recall how Henry Louis Gates, Jr. found the importance of an improvisational author function in the source text which we compare against Equiano.Stories to consider the specific ways in which it fails to adapt this improvisational spirit. We then dedicate much deliberation to the specific author function of the name and its change to username in Insta-film before discussing the importance of the loss of verb tense in the forms of the source and adapted text.

In the 14th highlight of Equiano.Stories (see Figure 1), the campfire of Equiano’s enslavers illuminates the image of Equiano as he performs an aside about sadness and loneliness. Such an aside, as we will address, is filmed from the virtual, anachronistic perspective of a smartphone, rendering his individualized body in the isolation of a portrait orientation as he externalizes his emotions. As such, this story dramatizes the force and complications of logocentric models of European subjectification and unintentionally highlights the difficulties and failures of Insta-film to adapt a literary genre such as the slave narrative utilized to play with such interpellation as racialized subjects. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. notes in Figures in Black, “ethnocentrism and logocentrism had been forged together into one irresistible weapon… to justify the enslavement of the African. The absence and presence of writing, of a collective Black voice… were drawn upon by European philosophers to deprive African slaves of their humanity” (104). Among the many examples possible, Gates notably chooses to cite not only Hegel’s justifications, but also Diderot’s racialized anthropological gaze. Gates writes, “As Diderot wrote of Samuel Richardson upon reading Clarissa, ‘It is he [the writer] who carries the torch to the back of the cave... He blows upon the glorious phantom who presents himself at the entrance of the cave; and the hideous Moor whom he was masking reveals himself’,” highlighting not only the historical tying of language and presence in these contexts, but also of firelight, tracing back to Plato’s foundational logocentric myth (105). In the case of Equiano.Stories, we suggest that, rather than the writer’s language, we have the light of Equiano’s kidnapper’s campfire fashioning Equiano’s image as an atomistic, “(sym)pathetic” individual (while presenting it as a mere illumination of an image that already exists), as the aperture of the smartphone captures and creates a simulacrum of his digital image. One could argue that, much like the slave narrative, the image of Equiano.Stories is forced to utilize the techne of the European colonizer to render himself legible to a potentially sympathetic audience, here as an Instagram story. Unfortunately, this dramatization of the European gaze, in its adaptation from slave narrative to Insta-film, loses an historically crucial rhetorical aspect of the genre. As Gates notes about Douglass, Equiano too, writing as a subject within language, plays with an ironic distance between his present lived self and the re-presented absent self on the page, relying on his readers’ hegemonic acceptance of the Hegelian dialectic between an immediate life and transcendentally unified being to mask over his constant revisions (112). We suggest that the ironic play with Enlightenment subjectivity that Equiano undertakes in the slave narrative is the crucial aspect that the filmmakers fail to adapt in the Insta-film. In doing so, they fail to account for Equiano’s rhetorical wrestling with the complex idea of agency as a Black narrator. What, then, is to be made of the relationship between light, logos, and racism when a slave narrative is adapted from its written form to a medium of pure light undergirded by protocological tendencies?

Perhaps the Insta-film’s title, Equiano.Stories, offers us one way to understand the implications of what has changed. The dropping of ‘Written By Himself’ becomes necessary when the adaptation is neither in written form nor produced by Equiano himself. Further, the first shot of the film — the first story rather — show words written in white against a black background. The words read “This is the true story of Olaudah Equiano, the boy who would become enslaved…”(1.1).2  The film ignores not only the other names by which Equiano went or was forced to go by: Gustavus Vassa (printed on the first page in the original narrative along with Olaudah Equiano but missing throughout the Insta-film), but also Jacob, Michael, and many others mentioned throughout the text. Part of Equiano’s improvisation of Enlightenment subjectivity is also through a refusal to submit to its naming practices. Throughout the slave narrative, Equiano engages in a tussle with different people about the names he wants to be addressed by—choosing and contesting the terms of his interpellation. While Instagram offers the ability to choose usernames and account handles, a user is always tied directly to an IP address and the numeric trace or their engagement in the registry. Perhaps a future consideration of VPNs which alter and mask such numeric identity in the face of digital interpellation is in order. Nevertheless, instead of a series of playful and ironic speech acts produced by some agency through written language on a page that remains slippery about its identification, what is then presented in the Insta-film is merely an array of lights, pixels, ordered by electrical [light] currents in logic gates to produce a unitary image of Olaudah Equiano acting out the first half or so of his slave narrative. We don’t get an Equiano who’s constructing and deconstructing himself in an improvised writing style, but instead, are merely left with Diderot’s platonic torch illuminating a projected image of Equiano from our smartphone screen. In the place of a written subject who at once establishes his ability to use language but also undermines the Enlightenment individual’s relation to language use, we have a unitary, non-improvisational, safely interpellated subject in the Insta-film. 

One finds another route to understand the implications of the Insta-film’s creative choices by focusing on the refusal to adapt Equiano’s commitment to defamiliarizing the technology through which he fashions his subjectivity. Instagram stories as a feature offers affordances that one can anachronistically imagine Equiano playing with (this is in fact the imaginative principle through which the film works). For instance, while able to ironically play with logocentric assumptions of language and presence, Equiano, writing through print technology, would still have to confront the Enlightenment thought which still, first and foremost, favors the presence of a speaking face. Thus, the slave narrative would always necessarily feature a self-portrait of the author presaging the text. The Insta-film as a digital platform that captures and presents a speaking subject alongside their speech, in some senses, is arguably better equipped as a form to deal with the obligations of Enlightenment subjectivity. Despite such platform-based affordances, the Insta-film’s creative choices attempt only to smooth over a fractured subjectivity that simultaneously defamiliarizes the medium which Equiano manages to do successfully with print technology despite some of its limitations.

For instance, the Insta-film comes far enough in thinking of a smartphone episode as an equivalent to the popular talking book episode in the slave narrative.3 In the 14th highlight, the presented image of Equiano holds and speaks to an object functioning much like his audience would understand a smartphone (see Figure 2). Earlier in 4.9, we are introduced to this doll-like object as the Dibia, or wiseman, gifts it to him, explaining to him, but also through the viewing plane to his audience that “this…this is me. It is your father and your mother…Inside of it, is this whole village” (Equiano.Stories 4.9). In highlight 19, Equiano’s image pulls the object from his pocket and presents it to another onboard the slave ship, claiming, “this is my family” (19.1). Returning to the 14th highlight, we find the protagonist speaking directly to this object, held as one would a smartphone, between himself and the camera perspective overlaid with an Instagram poll sticker urging responses as though speaking to the object is directly speaking to his audience. It becomes the stand-in for the medium through which one connects to those not immediately present in their vicinity. While such a totemistic object is not unheard of in Igbo cultures, it is non-existent in the written slave narrative. Given that the book plays a similar role in the slave narrative, the talking book episode defamiliarizes the object that makes communication possible. Because this rhetorical play of the author with the object of narration is missing, in the Insta-film we are instead left with an anthropological gaze which rather conflates such objects with an ideology doing more to reify smartphones than disseminating Igbo knowledge, making smartphone-like angles and relations to smartphone-like objects appear timeless and global enough to have been present in pre-slavery Igbo culture. A smartphone here doesn’t appear as random and arbitrary as Equiano manages to make the book look in the slave narrative. That defamiliarization of the very object and medium through which he is fashioning a self is what the Insta-film smooths over, undermining the disruptive potential that the narrative comes with.

In the shift of medium from print to digital, the oft-used metaphor of logocentric techne of light becomes far more literal. Just as in the written medium, the logic of the digital creates an expectation of an enlightened subject emergent from Plato's cave as present in the representation of an image on a screen. If logocentrism builds on a metaphor of language as the light of truth, Bernard Steigler’s work, drawing on the Promethean myth, renders the metaphor literal once more, reading the fire-light of Prometheus’s gift itself as technological pharmakon. This is valuable both in regard to recognizing technologies, or techne, available beyond language and also drawing a literal connection between the medium of binary computation and light as truth. We can imagine the transmission of electric-light signals across a processor to construct an array of LED phone lights as a light illuminating truth. In the forgetting of this never-ending process of calculating representations, we come to reify the subjectivities presented onscreen. Indexical photography, rendered through face filters becomes subjectifying imagery. In Instagram’s case, the ever ready-to-hand rectangle of light presents us with reified images of ourselves on what appears to be a static platform, making us forget the process-nature of both ourselves and of Instagram as a web service. Returning from linguistic deconstruction to one of technics, one could still find a parallel relationship to what Gates had found in the slave narrative. There still exists an assumption of being that prioritizes enlightening presence in matters of communication, self-creation, and knowledge. In theory, one such as Equiano could easily still play with the ironic distance between an identity proposed and circulated by a username and the identity of one’s lived being. However, rather than finding ways to improvise and utilize these assumptions as in Equiano’s original narrative, the digital in Equiano.Stories utilizes light to represent an image of Equiano under a limited anthropological gaze.

Such mythical dramatization finds literal historical connection when, as Paul Henly notes, students were shown first in lecture halls and then in the sensationalized form of the world fair, “‘magic lantern’ slides of scenes from around the world” (Henly 77). Students and spectators were made privy to images of indigenous peoples projected on early versions of film projection as “a series of images in the ‘magic lantern’ slide shows,” rendering a simultaneously hypervisible and biased, one sided gaze (Henly 85, 78). While not addressing the cinematic subjectification of these indigenous peoples, Simone Browne, in her work Dark Matters, considers the parallel technological role of firelight in the governing subjugation of Black bodies, drawing a direct lineage from the modern-day problems of smartphone data mining and surveillance back to Antebellum lantern laws. She recalls a set of New York laws where  ““no Negro, Mulatto or Indian slave above the age of fourteen years” unless in the company of “some white person…was to be without a lantern lit so that it could be plainly seen”” (78 emphasis added). She writes that, “we can think of the lantern as a prosthesis made mandatory after dark… for the Black body to be constantly illuminated…made knowable, locatable” (79 emphasis added). Thus, if we think of Stiegler’s Promethean myth as an extended deconstruction of Enlightenment thought in relation to technical objects, there is a further nuance in the European colonial legacy where the African enslaved were not kindly given – nor in need of – but forcibly strapped with the Promethean fire for enslavers to commit further oppressive surveillance. There is little coincidence that the recent most marketed innovator of technical progress for smartphones has been in algorithmically aided improvement of camera quality and more detailed screen resolution. And Instagram — with its focus on sharing pictures, stories, and secretly mined data — marks that turning point towards a new surveilled subjectivization/subjugation. While the historical Equiano is also strapped with the colonial technologies of logocentrism, there is still a Being exceeding the written subject “Equiano” who is able to turn tool to bricolage for self-survival. Contrarily, the lights which (re)produce an image of Equiano in Equiano.Stories reveal neither the actual image of the lived being of Equiano nor the image produced by Equiano’s manipulation of colonial technologies. Rather, one technology of colonial oppression, Blackness, is revealed and (re)assigned to Equiano’s being by another technology of light-as-surveillance.

Alongside the loss of this improvisational force playing with Enlightenment logic which we identify as the historical author “Equiano,” what we also lose in the adaptation is the powerful performance in his play with verb tense. Instagram stories, as they are filmed in real-time, intending to provide snippets of daily life, by nature of their form cannot hold such a retrospective gap between autobiographic narrator and filmed subject. From the first story following the title sequence, Equiano’s representation through light is depicted holding the camera-phone, filming and speaking into it. “You guys have to meet my sister,” he says while his outstretched arm frames the left edge of a screen shaking to the bounce of his footsteps (Equiano.Stories 2.1). There is an anachronistic assumption that Equiano was always already a western liberal or Enlightenment subject capable of using a smartphone. The screen even digitally renders “stickers” featuring the Christian year 1756 as well as an extradiegetic timestamp dating the story’s existence (see Figure 3). The nature of the instantaneous posting of these stories suggests that Equiano’s image was already posting these, utilizing the technology, before the forced entrance into the European world-hood through the experience of learning. The assumption then erases the possibility for Equiano to performatively transition into subjecthood. What we are thus left with is the object that remains object, a construction of lights, interacting with another object, the smartphone camera. In the slave narrative, Equiano carefully employs the conventions of tenses in English to identify the temporal distance between his African and Euro-American experience. The Insta-film flattens this out in the simple present tense, shaped as it is by the conventions of Instagram as a medium and Insta-stories as a form.

Interestingly, however, Equiano’s narrative does already contain the potential for a critique of the smartphone era from Equiano’s perspective. The portrait, listed among the master’s tools, functions as a means of both immortality and surveillance. As Gates notes, “the portrait seems to be watching him as he moves through the room,” and that, “portraits, moreover, do stare one in the face…” (155).  Instagram, as a platform to share images and short video clips of oneself and one’s life, more primarily serves as a surveillance instrument for both state and corporate interests. In Equiano.Stories, the portrait scene is dramatized such that an enslaver cruelly threatens the camera, supposedly Equiano’s point of view, but looking at viewers: “he will tell us about you,” says the man while gesturing to a portrait hanging on the wall (22.5-22.6) (see Figure 4). Speaking to the audience through the viewing plane, referring to a selfie-esque portrait as surveiller, it is as though the enslaver reminds viewers of the purpose of Instagram stories, and thus Insta-film, as a panoptic device. Yet, once again, because there is no direct rhetorical connection between the medium, subject, and creator, Equiano, it is not Equiano who is able to counter-surveil as he is able to speak back in the written medium of the text. The lack of trace of Equiano in Equiano.Stories leaves the man’s words not as critique, but as cynical threat. Viewers surveil Equiano’s lantern image under an often white gaze while the algorithms of Instagram surveil us. The image presented to viewers is not of Equiano so much as it is a liberalized lantern image for the sake of white, ethnographic surveillance.

The Protocol and Excess of Equiano.Stories

In this section, we move from the form of Insta-film to discussing the protocological medium that is Instagram. Equiano.Stories as an adaptation, we argue, fails to adapt the “resistant object” that Blackness serves as in the slave narrative (In the Break 12-15). In failing to do so, the filmmakers lose the opportunity to capitalize on the affordances of the medium towards improvisational breaks. We begin by looking at the large mosaic of Equiano’s image adorning the main page of Equiano.Stories where a user’s thumbnail gallery of photographic posts would normally appear. Such a mosaic, featuring Equiano holding a smartphone to his face, forms a perfect synecdoche of the Insta-film’s construction of Equiano’s image as lantern image (see Figure 5). One might be surprised to see the mosaic dividing lines so foregrounded in Equiano.Stories’ version of the formally unifying and smoothing nature of the self-portrait. Alexander Galloway offers a model of understanding the way protocol unifies and smooths over a decentralized ratiocentric system of exchange that the internet otherwise would be, much like the smoothing over of a centralized logocentrism before it. Equiano.Stories operates as a computationally produced lantern image of Equiano caught in these unified, decentralized protocols. As Galloway notes, “The act of ‘surfing the Web’[is] an unnerving experience of radical dislocation… Continuity, then, is defined as the set of [protocological] techniques practiced by web-masters that, taken as a totality, create this pleasurable, fluid experience for the user” (64). Much like the various expectations and semantic laws which had governed European logocentric exchanges of writing, these protocols function as rules governing the ratiocentric systems of exchange.

In the Insta-film self-portrait, Equiano’s image is still divided by the lines distinguishing each tile, but those are smoothed over by the whole plane of the page. Further, following the protocological law of endless and interconnected hypertext links, each image is selectable as a link to the individual post with its own likes, comments, shareability, and data collection, contributing to the protocological necessity Galloway calls “the elimination of a lack of links” (Galloway 66).4  Thus rather than relying on the sense of unity created in the slave narrative’s author portrait, the  portrait of Equiano in Equiano.Stories foregrounds the fractured, but still governed subjectivity we would find in each thumbnail as memory and attempt at self-expression while still highlighting the illusion of their unification in the end.  Thinking about the slave narrative as a tool of resistance to newer subjectifying and subjugating technologies such as Instagram requires new aesthetic considerations in this ratiocentric information era. Building on Moten’s conceptualization of the “resistant object” in his work, In the Break would provide us one such way (12-15). For him, the resistant object both refuses to be subsumed under Enlightenment logic and offers the possibility of an immanent opening. While we have thus far questioned the ability of Equiano.Stories to retain the author-function necessary to make a slave narrative effective, Moten might suggest Gates’s approach to language and slave narrative had rather never actually overcome subsumption into liberal subjectivity.5 The agency Moten finds in the shrieking enslaved prior to exchangeability marks an immanent opening towards reflexive reshaping of the previously exclusive, centralized totalities of Enlightenment thought.  

The benefit of Moten’s reanimating an immanent agential force behind the traced différance of the signifiers of Equiano can be demonstrated in the formatting of the Instagram stories themselves. Instagram stories are necessarily broken into a collection of protocologically determined durations, a brief loading screen dividing each segment of the story. These breaks, despite their subservience to protocol, offer an opportunity or line of flight for an improvisational break if Moten’s resistant object had been at the helm. For example, the earlier mentioned introduction of the surveilling painting is split into two stories by a loading screen as if to foreground to viewers, with the abrupt interruption of a dark loading screen reflecting the user’s face, the surveilling platform on which they are experiencing the narrative. The improvisational playing with these medium-driven breaks could constitute a unique formal choice for creative expression and resistance to the platform’s control. However, despite this artistic opportunity afforded by Insta-films, Equiano.Stories often uses these clean breaks to double down on either the notion of atomistic liberal individuals or the ethnographic observation of an exoticized Igbo life. Instead of actively engaging in improvisational acts of fugitivity, Equiano.Stories actively reterritorializes even the accidental ruptures that the medium enables. For instance, stories 18.1-18.8 each feature a portrait image of another captured woman on the boat, each labeled with a name and brief description. Granted, the denial of personhood would be absurd. However, as noted of Equiano's image before, the stamping of these labels – further bizarre given that the original narrative doesn’t engage in this version of naming-process – in such a hard frame as a single story per person prior to the rhetorical move of depicting the transition into a European cosmos robs the Igbo and other African people of their pre-liberal identity and recognitions of subjecthood. These are images of Equiano already shaped and circulating in a ratiocentric and logocentric economy. Equiano as a performing agent had no choice in the presentation of these stories and, as such, loses the ability to play with the limits of the logics used.

The conceptualization of the whole screen as a single plane functions as another important element of the protocological continuity produced on the internet, removing distinctions between links, text, video, and more. Under such logic, the whole page of Equiano.Stories, a social media profile, plays into the uncritical adaptation of his image as a liberal atomistic being. Despite the displayed username in the Insta-film matching the film title, Equiano.Stories, the proper name attached to the protagonist of the film all throughout is still “Olaudah Equiano.” Mimicking the expected use of the social media platform, this display name furthers the assumption that the filmer of the stories is an Equiano, though once again eliding the use of his multiple names,” which, as we have noted, constitutes an important formal element of the original slave narrative. We are, once again, to adhere to the uniformity of protocol, stripped of the rhetorical improvisational process of taking on a signifier, left only with one, the username, already in circulation among all other usernames on the Instagram platform.  Above these, however, the foundational governing protocol to each of these protocological forms is hypertext: Hypertext as Markup Language and as Transfer Protocol. The former functions less as an object and more as an envelope or filter which tells computers how to arrange the material on a page. The latter makes up the network of links on pages which lead into each other in a massive web. The Equiano.Stories page contains the already mentioned links as well as links to the pages for the production company and partnered museum and a link to the film’s adjacent TikTok page. Further, there are a number of links presented in the various stories pasted over the viewing plane, turning Equiano.Stories into a proper hypertext fiction. In story 4.1, while the village’s Dibia speaks to the camera and Equiano, a hyperlink takes viewers to X (formerly Twitter) where an explanatory quote from the written narrative is given as a tweet. In 4.3, a hyperlink takes viewers to Stelo.Stories’ website with an animation explaining the meaning of Equiano’s name, among others. HTML, though not visible to the viewer, organizes each of these links to provide viewers useful, but – like the ethnographic shows of the old World Fairs – carefully curated information on the Igbo people’s culture. The filmmakers circumscribe the affordability of the platform to enable random exits out of the narrative by also curating the links to which these exits take the viewers. Equiano.Stories gives an illusion of openness in its mimicking of web-surfing which in fact masks the reality of its enclosed, fully determined Equiano. There is no eventual rupture, no unexplainable thing which forces viewers to contend with the footage, to freely visit a library or museum. If the shriek of Aunt Hester anticipatorily interrupts Douglass’s narrative, the cries of the pornotroped women in Equiano.Stories are accompanied by digitally imposed trigger warnings (16.1) and explanatory links (16.3) which treat the actions of enslavers as yet another banal anthropological oddity. Equiano’s image here  doesn’t emit a disruptive effect produced by Blackness. For Moten, expressions of Blackness come from, “a desire for the informal, which is to say that which informs, that which gives and takes form” (284). Whereas Equiano.Stories produces a clean and neutralized ethnographic historical depiction built on protocological prefab platforms, Moten finds that in artistic expression of Blackness, “the informal will have also been given or will have been seen to have been instantiated in every undercommon ruptural social generativity” (284). Thus, Equiano’s image in Equiano.Stories, lacking the animating force of the resistant object, merely remains a collection of lights reassembled for viewers by HTML and an algorithm (284). However, the ease with which Insta-film can be made into a hypertext fiction, and the vast range of flexibility hyperlinks offer, once again introduces formal potential for improvisational play with the calculating logics of internet protocol that could be utilized beyond a kind of enclosed ethnographic scavenger hunt.

Liberalizing Equiano: Characterization and Virtual Point of View

In this section, we account for Insta-film’s cinematography by engaging with the concept of the “virtual point of view” which offers a potential formal device that could function in resistance to the surveilling medium’s totalizing control. Equiano.Stories, not emerging from a vacuum, also draws resemblance from past film genres such as the magic lantern slides and melodramatic ethnographic cinema.

In the story 3.8, Equiano records on his phone one of the girls in Igboland singing and dancing (see Figure 6). The song goes “In my home, I am free, and you are me…” Notably, this song is not mentioned in Equiano’s narrative. The filmmakers add this and several songs and dance sequences to the text, turning Equiano’s slave narrative into something closer to an ethnographic film. With detailed depictions of the customs, clothes, social hierarchies, and art forms given more emphasis through the film (including their enslavement), the filmmakers turn Equiano’s narrative of freedom into one of ethnography. While making pre-colonial history accessible is incredibly valuable, we should not forget that rendering non-European peoples exotic has been a colonial power dynamic in play for centuries. Equiano chooses to narrate his tale through the genre of spiritual autobiography that laid emphasis on the idea of progress. His description of Igbo culture is restricted to two out of the twelve chapters in the narrative. The rest of the narrative outlines his fight against chattel slavery, his manumission, and his continued struggle and progress. The Insta-film, by restricting itself just to the first two chapters, spends hardly any time on the narrative’s focus on progress.

The bias of this ethnographic Insta-film comes in its regulation of subjects through a liberal framework – which includes assumptions about individuation, economic and social capacities to narrate, and particulars neatly subsumed under universal values. The Insta-film’s tagline sums up the liberal assumptions through which Equiano’s life is approached: “what if an African child in 1756 had Instagram when he was enslaved?” (dusablemuseum.org). It assumes that Instagram as a mode of narration can be imagined to be a part of eighteenth-century British Empire and accessible by everyone – including the enslaved. The economic structures that make a smartphone and Wi-Fi accessible, the social structures that teach one what the idea of a self is and also how to narrate one’s life along with those of others related to them, the political structures that decide who can own property such as a smartphone are all built upon systems of slavery and colonialism, but here ignored. The film functions on the liberal dream that these already have universal access and it is only a matter of sincere effort that will determine the progress of the individual. In this section, we focus on two aspects of the Insta-film adaptation that further consolidates the liberal foundations it functions on: one, characterization; and two, the viewer’s role that replaces the reader’s role in Equiano’s narrative.

The film’s liberal Africa is most starkly present in the kind of characterization the Insta-film undertakes, differing substantially from Equiano’s narrative. W.J. Harvey in his work Character and the Novel notes that, “the novel is the… art form of liberalism... [It] has as its controlling center an acknowledgement of the plenitude, diversity and individuality of human beings in society…”(24). Equiano’s genre of autobiography carefully resists the novelistic approach to storytelling and characterization. Equiano spends little time building the characters or even naming those close to him. Intimacy, memory-making and identity are not necessarily tied in the narrative to the idea of a liberal subject identifiable as distinct in attitude and seen as possessing a clear and narratable interiority.  The Insta-film’s novelizing account completely ignores the Africa rigorously studied by scholars and carefully fashioned by Equiano as well as his own early relation to liberalism. In 2.7, 2.16, and 3.20 respectively, the Insta-film imposes names onto Equiano’s unnamed family.6 Further, the film develops all these characters in detail including their body language, consistent clothing choices, attitude towards Equiano and others in the community, aesthetic preferences, etc. The beginning of a character arc is also noticeable in most of these characters – none of which is the case in Equiano’s narrative.

As the source text further rejects a novelistic characterization, Equiano had also resisted the trend of strengthening the narrator’s role underway in the late eighteenth-century that continued to fashion an omniscient point of view.  In Equiano’s written narrative, we see him directly referring to the reader at different points in the text. The immersive, subjective narration is broken at different points when he reaches out of the diegetic world of the text and talks to the reader directly. Given the political, and rhetorical intent of slave narratives, the white British audience largely constitutes this reader that Equiano invokes. Instagram as a medium shows inherent promise in the ability to translate such a feature given that anything filmed and displayed on the social media platform is assumed to be filmed by, and to include, its subject. When translating Equiano’s narrative into the 21st-century cybernetic-cinematic medium, the creators have utilized what can be called a selfie point of view. Instead of an omniscient narrator, we have a selfie narrator through most of the film, which presents the audience with intimate access to Equiano and the workings of his mind. In his work, Cinematic Skepticism, Jeroen Gerrits offers a potentially translatable and generative tool called the virtual point of view. Following the work of Stanley Cavell, Gerrits notes of digital cinema that, while analog film respects a kind of Kantian separation from the world, letting it speak back to viewers through the silver-screen-as-transcendental-faculty, “the digital will…, wants to control by gaining access…by not merely pointing [at the screen] but actually touching… It wants to access the diegetic world, even if only in the dematerialized form: it wants a virtual point of view” (181). The interactive hypertextual elements as well as the presumptions of a selfie point of view both speak to how the will of digital cinema foresees the rise of its literal applications on these new protocological digital platforms. In Cinematic Skepticism, Gerrits further characterizes the virtual point of view, taking on a Deleuzian immanent opening, as one that offers neither a character’s point of view nor an objective omniscient point of view. It suggests a “point of view that is localized but not materialized within the diegetic world” and thus points to an outside that is somehow not (132). Such an aporetic dynamic resonates strongly with Moten’s conception of the outside which is within and emerges in improvisational encounters. Such a virtual point of view seems to naturally emerge in Insta-film as, given the interactive expectations of Instagram, any third person perspective suddenly blurs the lines of subjectivity and point of view. In 11.1 and 11.2 of Equiano.Stories, for example,we see Equiano and his sister tied up in a make-shift room after being kidnapped. As they sit weeping beside their guarding kidnappers, the camera angle is no longer Equiano’s point of view, but a third-person apparently objective shot. It is placed away from Equiano and his sister, directed at them and the bodies of the kidnappers who come and go from the static frame. The medium of Instagram necessitates a diegetically involved filmer here, particularly in this moment of depicted violence against Equiano’s lantern image of Blackness, but who would be filming this? Thus far, Equiano has solely retained his first-person perspective, but here, in the split, there is an impossible observer, there diegetically as the camera of the smartphone thus far has been, but also absent in this gaseous, non-embodied perspective. The virtual point of view emerging here, particularly at a moment of middle passage trauma, formally creates a promising irruption with much potential for improvisation. However, because there is no real resistant object, this aporetic opening doesn’t point back across the middle passage, but instead toward the digital will to intrude, and in this case, surveil. 

In Equiano.Stories’ failure to resist, it becomes rather a synecdochic performance of racial politics on the Instagram platform. The ethnographic genre and virtual point of view come together to highlight how Simone Browne discusses the white perspective of the mass media era. While discussing the mass broadcasting of the Rodney King assault, Browne likens the event to those lantern laws once more, writing that, “under these conditions of terror and the violent regulation of Blackness by way of surveillance, the inequities between those who were watched over and those who did the watching are revealed” (21 emphasis added). Gerrits’ virtual point of view is not merely unique in the digital era, but also resonates with how the digital affects the Black Lives Matter era in which Instagram invites users to be involved in the lives, plight, and resistance of Black people through the consumption and sharing on the platform while simultaneously remaining gaseous but absent from the actual scenes of violence. Even though Equiano’s image addresses the camera and hence the viewers at different points through the scene of his capture, there is no such metafictional engagement. The camera remains ‘virtually’ present, but any filmer/user engagement is absent from the scene. Equiano.Stories’ lantern image is produced for an audience to benignly consume anti-Blackness as an identity trait without engaging beyond the logic of the platform – sharing, posting, arguing in comments, etc. When we understand the role of the viewer of this film with (dis)regard to slavery and its afterlives, as Saidiya Hartman puts it, we see the virtual point of view perform the role that contemporary viewers play vis-a-vis anti-Blackness. This consumption of anti-Blackness, even if it means at the level of being sympathetic to Equiano’s troubles, further adds to Instagram as a platform that has continued to function on a liberal idea of democracy. The widespread consumption of these Instagram stories is quantified as valuable data and the viewing influences the algorithm of each individual viewer. This creative decision of the filmmakers to translate the reader’s role into a virtual point of view at different instances in the film nudges us to further reflect on Instagram-interaction as an end-in-itself.

The filmmakers, as noted earlier, have on various occasions described Equiano.Stories as imagining a particular scenario: “What if an African child in 1756 had Instagram when he was enslaved?” The film is premised on the possibility of Instagram being an essential and natural part of everyone’s lives. Had they not made the camera and screen an active part of the diegetic world, the virtual POV would not emerge, since in traditional cinema, there is necessarily always a camera POV. If the tagline mentioned above describes Equiano’s possible relation to Instagram, the virtual POV indicates the possible relation the viewers have to Instagram and, by extension, the diegetic world depicted within. Here our work departs from Henig and Ebbrecht-Hartmann who in “Witnessing Eva Stories,” in a laudatory tone towards Stelo.Stories – who produced both Eva.Stories and Equiano.Stories – argue that as a platform Instagram enables the inscription of the users into a responsive space in terms of remembering the Holocaust. Although there is no contention about the space that Instagram creates for memory making, we deviate from their project in terms of how we conceive the role of the user in this historical retelling. Henig and Ebbrecht-Hartmann don’t pay sufficient attention to the role of the camera in this Insta-film. They do note that they “are interested in the…relations between selfie aesthetics and witnessing, and in the implications of first-person point-of-view shots in combination with handheld cameras as visual expression of witnessing” (207). However, they pay no attention to the virtual POV shots which are crucial cinematic translations of reader’s position in the texts that are adapted — in their case, The Diary of Eva Heyman. In the context of the BLM movement, “performative activism” has been a contested issue with regard to how very little it accomplishes in the name of allyship. White-liberal guilt was seen to be easily assuaged through certain social media acts. While not contesting the mobilizing power of social media, we highlight how Instagram as a platform along with its content enables this performative activism. Further, we posit that Equiano.Stories even as it functions with a similar logic and belief in social media through its creative choices ends up offering us a way to critique Instagram. The mere consumption of anti-Black content and its circulation, even when well-intended, contributes to what some have called Black trauma porn. Saidiya Hartman’s now classic refusal to reproduce traumatic scenes of Black torture is paid no heed when anti-Black violence is circulated with ease on Instagram. Scenes that are not described in graphic detail in Equiano.Stories are imagined with increased pathos in this adaptation, underwriting the kind of self-fashioning that was crucial to Equiano. The reduction of Black experience to merely that of the violence experienced goes against the freedom acts that Black people are creatively engaged in. Even if one doesn’t heed Hartman’s thoughtful engagement with violence in Scenes of Subjection, the complete removal of freedom acts from stories narrated about Black people is unthoughtful and malicious, to say the least.

We have so far discussed the virtual POV as a camera angle with regard to Equiano.Stories and now we turn to the camera itself as equipment and its interactions with Blackness. Reading this equipment in the Insta-film is further enriched when read alongside Equiano’s aforementioned engagement with the book as equipment in the slave narrative. The context in this case, Instagram consumption of films made possible through a camera, demands that we ask what the relationship between Blackness and equipment of storytelling is. The film’s failure to defamiliarize the camera by staging a confrontation between Equiano and camera, similar to his talking-book episode, serves to further consolidate liberal storytelling as a universal and given. It is in the light of this failure that we in fact come to better appreciate the choices Equiano makes in order to defamiliarize liberalism.

Conclusion: When Hypertext Becomes the Hypotext

That hypertext functions protocologically as both connecting and presaging metalanguage resonates with how Equiano.Stories as a hypertext of Equiano’s narrative reverses and breaks the expected hypo-/hyper- binary. Its wide access means this will be so many younger peoples’ first encounter with Equiano’s slave narrative. Like hypertext markup, this piece as a hypertext of Equiano’s slave narrative will alter perceptions of any encounter with Equiano’s narrative going forward. Like hypertext transfer protocol, this piece also affects the potential pathways to encountering Equiano’s narrative. Thus, hypertext takes on the influencing role typically reserved for hypo-text. As digital adaptations come to be more influential and the primary source by which new generations may encounter the text – provided Meta upholds its archives – consideration of the materiality in relation to context becomes important for genres such as the slave narrative. Like Hermansson and others we move away from the pro-fidelity and anti-fidelity discourse within adaptation studies. However, alongside Hermansson, our paper is built on the belief that fidelity has a continued usefulness "as an approach—with context, perhaps, but without apology” (151). In the case of the slave narrative, as we have exemplified in Equiano.Stories, the context is less the content of the source text and more its formal abilities to improvisationally play with text — both slave narrative as the genre and the book as a colonial narrating and subjectifying tool. Equiano is conning the text and the logocentric assumptions of being, truth, and language, pragmatically arguing to a white colonial audience for the recognition of African being within European metaphysics. There are ways that this improvisational play could translate rather powerfully to an Insta-film. The protocological pressure to smooth over difference could be a place for ironic play and for Moten’s ruptures of Blackness as resistant object to emerge. However, since there is no agential force improvising with the protocological assumptions, Equiano.Stories, as an early attempt, does not quite succeed.  Much of the rhetorical turns which made Equiano’s written narrative function are replaced by an ethnographic gaze and both liberalized and infantilized focus on the image of Equiano. As such we are left with the lantern image of Equiano, a pixelated simulacrum of his body reconstructed and manipulated for the sake of racial surveillance. Instagram as a platform presents a number of challenges towards the production of impactful art as it forces a kind of continuity for the sake of increased data collection. Despite its goal of personal expression and the continuing trend of finding within its profiles our subjectivity, such limitations make rendering genuine being a difficult task, requiring a creative engagement with its medium and its forms — such as Insta-film — the failure of which leaves only a lantern image in its place.