UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

Book Jacket: "Emmanuel Appadocca; or, Blighted Life: A Tale of the Boucaneers" by M. Philip

Maxwell Philip

Edited with an afterword by Selwyn R. Cudjoe
Introduction by William E. Cain

The first Caribbean novel, an extraordinary tale of adventure and revenge on the high seas

Originally published in 1854, this remarkable novel tells the story of a mulatto son's quest for vengeance against his white father, a sugar planter who abandoned him and his mother. Intent on redeeming his mother's honor, and outraged by the cruelty and greed that slavery has engendered, Appadocca sails the seas with a band of ruthless pirates on a ship named the Black Schooner. The story is swiftly paced and packed with action, and the narrative is enriched and complicated by Appadocca's reflections on the nature and implications of racism, slavery, colonialism, and retribution.

Written by Michel Maxwell Philip (1829—1888), one of the most important Caribbean intellectual-activists of the nineteenth century, Emmanuel Appadocca was published at a time in American history when the slavery crisis was intensifying and civil war loomed. In its themes, symbols, and literary techniques, the book is reminiscent of three other major works from the 1850s: Melville's Moby-Dick, Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom. This new edition, with scholarly commentaries and annotations, will reorient our understanding of the development of Caribbean literature in relation to English and American literary production. It shows that the beginnings of the Anglo-Caribbean novel lie half a century earlier than previously acknowledged.

"A true page-turner. . . . It captures the cold fury raging against racism, class oppression, and slavery behind the calm exterior of a European-trained, mixed-race intellectual of the early nineteenth century."

William D. Piersen, author of Black Legacy: America's Hidden Heritage

Selwyn R. Cudjoe is the Marian Butler McLean Professor of Africana Studies at Wellesley College.

William E. Cain is the Mary Jewett Gaiser Professor of English, also at Wellesley College.

Caribbean Literature / American Studies
336 pp.
LC 96-47786
$60.00s cloth, ISBN 1-55849-075-2
$24.95s paper, ISBN 1-55849-076-0
1997
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