living teaching the subject he loves, he enjoys the esteem of his fellows, he marries and has a family with a desirable woman of patrician bearing all of which would seem – unattainable for a foreigner, an ex-slave, an African. It is a delicate, contingent condition, a contradiction of sorts, as is arguably his very name. As an anomaly, he joins the ranks of other exceptional individuals, such as Phillis Wheatley (d. 1784), who in all likelihood originated in Senegambia and therefore may have shared that distinction with Juan Latino; as well as her contemporary Olaudah Equiano (d. 1797) who, if indeed he was born in southeastern Nigeria and not South Carolina, also experienced slavery only to surmount it.25 Like Latino, Wheatley distinguished herself as a poet, while Equiano would go on to become a leading abolitionist and labor leader in England, where he also wed a local woman and produced a family. There is no gainsaying that these and others who achieved various levels of notoriety were exceptional, including Muslims who astounded their captors with their literacy in Arabic, often escaping their intended destinies via entirely serendipitous circumstances. Although aberrant, the Juan Latinos and Phillis Wheatleys are part and parcel of the inconsistencies and contradictions that can be found in the annals of western slavery. Their visibility is explained by the fact that they managed to avoid the fate of so many others their but in so doing their accounts serve to draw attention to, rather “of kind,” than deflect from the catastrophe that was the transatlantic slave trade. And in that trade are the seeds of modernity; that is, the dawn of relations and hierarchies of power and privilege across race, class, and gender that begin locally, but through colonial and imperial expansion become increasingly more global and entrenched through the tireless
living teaching the subject he loves, he enjoys the esteem of his fellows, he marries and has a family with a desirable woman of patrician bearing – all of which would seem unattainable for a foreigner, an ex-slave, an African. It is a delicate, contingent condition, a contradiction of sorts, as is arguably his very name. As an anomaly, he joins the ranks of other exceptional individuals, such as Phillis Wheatley (d. 1784), who in all likelihood originated in Senegambia and therefore may have shared that distinction with Juan Latino; as well as her contemporary Olaudah Equiano (d. 1797) who, if indeed he was born in southeastern Nigeria and not South Carolina, also experienced slavery only to surmount it.25 Like Latino, Wheatley distinguished herself as a poet, while Equiano would go on to become a leading abolitionist and labor leader in England, where he also wed a local woman and produced a family. There is no gainsaying that these and others who achieved various levels of notoriety were exceptional, including Muslims who astounded their captors with their literacy in Arabic, often escaping their intended destinies via entirely serendipitous circumstances. Although aberrant, the Juan Latinos and Phillis Wheatleys are part and parcel of the inconsistencies and contradictions that can be found in the annals of western slavery. Their visibility is explained by the fact that they managed to avoid the fate of so many others “of their kind,” but in so doing their accounts serve to draw attention to, rather than deflect from the catastrophe that was the transatlantic slave trade. And in that trade are the seeds of modernity; that is, the dawn of relations and hierarchies of power and privilege across race, class, and gender that begin locally, but through colonial and imperial expansion become increasingly more global and entrenched through the tireless