Biopolitics and Resistance to Corporeal Dispossession in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

• In Event: Biopolitical Emergenc(i)es: Toward a New Genealogy of Race, Gender, and Liberal Dispossession

Abstract

This paper takes up an argument previously published in an article from 2016 ("Dark Matters: Race and the Antebellum Logic of Decorporation"; symplokē: Materialisms) in which I demonstrate the ways in which early U.S. law established a disengagement of black corporeality from conscious personhood or, in Enlightenment terms, conscious self-aware agency. This logic plays out in both established and case law, in local, state, and federal courts, and extends a distinctly U.S. schema of racialized possessive individualism and biopolitical formulations of an idealized populace.

As case law attempted to establish the personhood status of enslaved black persons in the late eighteenth and early to mid-nineteenth centuries, the courts found themselves attempting to instantiate the incorporation of laboring black bodies into the imagined biopolitical populace while reinforcing an exile of black agentic personhood. This peculiar form of dispossession became increasingly embedded in law, as evidenced by state and federal supreme court cases.

This paper proposes to demonstrate that socio-legal (and corporeal) decapitations of black bodies became systemic in the early to mid-nineteenth century. The establishment of white citizenship along with the broader logic of political incorporation emerged with and through a logic of biopolitical exile that divided body from agentic personhood. American models of political identity, agency, sovereignty, governance, and even corporeality were all inflected in this period by the delineation of incorporated and exiled personhoods, and this process required the figurative decapitation of black persons in order to construct an imagined rational populace that must be protected.

In 1829, State [of North Carolina] v. Mann established that no master is liable for battery of a slave because that body is an extension of the will of the master. In taking possession of herself, young Lydia exerted agency over her body and violated the law of corporeal dispossession.

This paper proposes to first explicate the biopolitical logic of decorporation through a close examination of State v. Mann and to then demonstrate how Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Harriet Jacobs, 1861) speaks to and refutes this dispossessive logic.

Jacobs’s body is subject to the same strictures that govern Lydia’s in State v. Mann – legislation circulates around her and penetrates, disciplines, structures, and organizes her body in relation to power systems. In so doing it disconnects her will – the seat of agentic self-possession or Lockean "liberty" – from her corpus.

Through ironic tableaus that upend how power operates by reordering how bodies circulate, Incidents seeks to disengage the black body’s forced labor from the constitutive logic of white legal and cultural personhood that early slave law articulated and enabled. At least within her narrative, the stasis of the absconded and hidden body facilitated a voice, a power, and a reappropriation of one’s legitimacy against the logic of slave law. Incidents interprets, responds to, and resists the decapitatory logic of early republican biopolitics, by which legal interpretations of the Constitution incorporated black bodies while exiling the volitional or agentic aspects of liberty in Locke’s sense.

Author

• Ashley Byock, Edgewood College