Autobiography, critical fabulation, and African voices in the Archive of Dutch Slavery: John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative (1790; 1796) and Joachim Nettelbeck’s Ein Mann (1910)

Abstract

In this article, I examine the print ‘A Group of Africans’ from John Gabriel’s Stedman’s Narrative, one the most iconic images of Surinamese slavery and the transatlantic slave-trade. Inspired by Hartman’s research methodology of critical fabulation, I explore archival sources, autobiographies, and other texts depicting African voices to provide the people depicted in the painting with context and specificity about their capture and appearance now on the shore of Suriname. Via the identification of the vessel in the background (de Vrouwe Elisabeth), we can trace its journey, identify captain Jan Harmel and the Rotterdam owners. First-mate Joachim Nettelbeck narrates part of this journey in his German autobiography, Ein Mann. The first-person narrative archival texts discussed here (Stedman, Nettelbeck, Equiano, Newton, Du Bois) differ markedly in reliability, their moments of writing, and participation in the action and reflection (Genette’s diegetic and non-diegetic narrator). The navigation of these texts and archives leads to a clearer portrait of Surinamese slavery, transatlantic slavery, and the people depicted by Stedman in this painting.

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Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	Van Oostrum, D. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3360-5992
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information:	© 2025 The Authors. Except as otherwise noted, this author-accepted version of a journal article published in Dutch Crossing: Journal of Low Countries Studies is made available via the University of Sheffield Research Publications and Copyright Policy under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ © 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
Keywords:	Slavery; postcolonial; John Gabriel Stedman; Joachim Nettelbeck; Dutch Colonialism; Autobiography
Dates:	Accepted: 18 August 2025 Published (online): 25 September 2025 Published: 25 September 2025
Institution:	The University of Sheffield
Academic Units:	The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Arts and Humanities (Sheffield) > School of English (Sheffield)
Funding Information:	Funder Grant number ARTS AND HUMANITIES RESEARCH COUNCIL AH/Y006534/1
Date Deposited:	29 Aug 2025 14:04
Last Modified:	01 Oct 2025 13:36
Status:	Published online
Publisher:	Taylor and Francis Group
Refereed:	Yes
Identification Number:	10.1080/03096564.2025.2564033
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID):	oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:230578

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Autobiography, critical fabulation, and African voices in the Archive of Dutch Slavery: John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative (1790; 1796) and Joachim Nettelbeck’s Ein Mann (1910)

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