Sovereignty and Post-Coloniality. The Reproduction of Hegemonic Discourse and Legitimization of Sovereign Violence Against the American Slave

Essay from the year 2016 in the subject History - America, grade: A, course: History of the United States, language: English, abstract: I aim to explore the question of American slavery in the mid 19th century by looking through literary, legal, and post-colonial lenses in an effort to show how abolition-era literary narratives utilize stereotype to reproduce a racist discourse and, further, how legal documents and actions reduce the slave to ‘homo sacer’ through a state of exception, ultimately making the slave the subject of legitimized sovereign violence. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published in 1852 by Harriet Beecher Stowe, is an anti-slavery, abolition-era narrative detailing the lives of a black slave family in the south. Though written with good intentions and anti-slavery sentiments, Stowe deploys a hegemonic ideology by confining slaves to their stereotypic bounds-lamenting slavery while utilizing a typical, Africanist-African-American depiction of slaves. Stowe reproduces a racist discourse by constructing stereotypical characterizations of black slaves; specifically their appearance and how they behave in comparison to their white counterparts.