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Fugitive Performance: Negotiating Biopower and the Law in US Chattel Slavery

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Fugitive Performance: Negotiating Biopower and the Law in US Chattel Slavery Fugitive Performance: Negotiating Biopower and the Law in US Chattel Slavery Lauren Heintz American Quarterly, Volume 71, Number 3, September 2019, pp. 675-695 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2019.0049 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/734906 Access provided at 9 Oct 2019 03:29 GMT from University of Hawaii @ Manoa Negotiating Biopower and the Law in US Chattel Slavery | 675 Fugitive Performance: Negotiating Biopower and the Law in US Chattel Slavery Lauren Heintz This fugitive movement is stolen life, and its relation to law is reducible neither to simple interdiction nor bare transgression. —Fred Moten, “The Case of Blackness” he Amistad Research Center in New Orleans houses a nineteenth- century court case concerning the question of slavery, states’ rights, Tfugitivity, and freedom. This 1810 trial, to my knowledge, has not yet received scholarly attention. The case, Margaret Aurelia Porter v. Reuben Reynolds (1810–12), has not made its way past the archival records into scholarship most likely because the file is incomplete—the outcome in the case remains unknown to us today.1 But this archival fragment still has a lot to tell us despite, or indeed because of, its missing court ruling: the court file has the lengthy, extant testimony of a formerly enslaved woman named Betty. In 1810 Betty is made to testify in court. She says that she has been free from the services of a white man named Stephen Porter for eleven years. Eleven years before, Betty ran away from Maryland and crossed the border into the free state of Pennsylvania, leaving all five of her children behind. Now, in 1810, three of her boys have run away too, and Porter wants his dues. He wants what he is owed for the runaways he cannot find. He wants money from the free person of color, Reuben Reynolds, who helped the boys get away. Twenty-four years before this court case is recorded, in 1786, Porter stole Betty, he didn’t buy her. He took her and confined her to his home, and in this home she had four children over thirteen years. She escaped, and now, eleven years later, her children have escaped. In her testimony she gives no information about how she made it out or about the location of her now fugitive children. She kept quiet on them, but she did not keep quiet on letting the court know that Porter took her from her former enslaver, that he stole her. Betty’s testimony is one extant part of the fugitive slave case Margaret Aurelia Porter v. Reuben Reynolds, whose archival documents number around fourteen 2019 The American Studies Association 676 | American Quarterly handwritten pages. Yet this case remains difficult to interpret because we don’t know the outcome: we don’t know if Reynolds, the free person of color who helped the boys run away, is made to pay the Porters, who are suing him by invoking the 1793 fugitive slave law. While this case is an archival fragment, what remains of Betty’s testimony is enough to create a remarkable picture of a life construed by the messy contours and nearly unbelievable plotlines of what negotiating life while enslaved looked like. Betty’s words testify to the uncer- tain ways that life was adjudicated under such precarious terms of freedom, fugitivity, and so-called justice. Most of all, the incomplete case file forces the reader to set Betty’s words apart from how the court did or did not interpret them; instead, the reader must view Betty’s words on their own terms, even as they remain mediated and subjected to transcription. To read Betty’s narrative on her own terms is to approach her fugitive act (and fugitive scenarios like hers) from a different vantage point. This reorientation reveals how fugitivity simultaneously worked both within and against the structures of power that seek to silence and contain. I begin with a sketch of Betty’s narrative in part because I spend the clos- ing portion of this essay analyzing her case in further detail, but also because I believe her fugitive testimony provides the opportunity to stage two central questions for this essay. First, how can such archival subjects function less in our current moment as positivist representations and more as performa- tive encounters; second, in the face of the unfolding biopolitical landscape of chattel slavery, what alternative forms of knowledge, power, and life do people like Betty provide? To respond initially, I take a cue from Alexander Weheliye’s text Habeas Viscus. Weheliye’s formulation is an intervention into the discourse of biopolitics and bare life. Habeas viscus is an assemblage of oppressed humanity, which “in contrast to bare life, insists on the importance of minuscule movements, glimmers of hope, scraps of food, the interrupted dreams of freedom found in those spaces deemed devoid of full human life. Beyond the dominion of the law, biopolitics, and bare life they represent alternative critical, political, and poetic assemblages that are often hushed in these debates.”2 This article takes up such an assemblage of movements, glimmers, dreams, and poetics that constitute the life of oppressed humanity in slavery. In an important yet small distinction from Weheliye, I examine such everyday lived performances not as “beyond” the law or biopolitics but as performing within and through biopolitics to expose slavery’s systems of governance that seek to imagine, contain, and define the life of the enslaved. In The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault’s introduction of two basic forms of power over life can and should be read as working in and through Negotiating Biopower and the Law in US Chattel Slavery | 677 the institution of chattel slavery, which, as Weheliye, Achille Mbembe, and others have argued, is a realm of early biopolitical experimentation. As Foucault outlines, the power over life is understood first as the “anatomy-politics of the human body,” which “centered on the body as a machine: its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces,” and second as the “biopolitics of population,” which regulated “propagations, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity.”3 The violent ma- nipulation of the enslaved body as both laboring machine and reproductive agent were two central components that functioned as defining mechanisms of slavery. The extraction of labor from the propertied body of the enslaved and the particular method of population and racial control in the reproductive mandate that the slave follow the condition of the mother are unique facets of biopolitical labor and population tactics. While such “power over life” in Foucault’s account functions “to invest life through and through,” in slavery such power strips life through and through, creating a condition of social death. The same processes effect an opposing outcome. The key, then, is to consider, as Saidiya Hartman asks, “to what exercise of the will, forms of ac- tion, or enactment of possibility is available to animate chattel, or the socially dead” under these particular conditions of power over life?4 While people like Betty indeed craft an alternative worldview that in part moves beyond the law and biopolitics of chattel slavery, I argue in this essay for what I call “fugitive performance,” in order to sit with the trouble of being a biopolitical subject under slavery.5 By turning to underrepresented schol- ars in the field of biopolitics, such as Hartman, Stephen Best, and Daphne Brooks, I argue that in the biopolitical world of slavery in which the cultures of the enslaved meet the cultures of the enslaver, fugitive performance does not perform in strict opposition to the labored, reproductive, and racialized biopolitical tactics of enslavement; rather, fugitive performance is always an expression and rearticulation of the very tactics that create the conditions of subjected life.6 Fugitive performance, to draw from Daphne Brooks, “confronts and transforms slavery’s putative ‘social death,’ turning that estranged condition into a rhetorical and social device and a means to survival.”7 In other words, fugitive performance is not necessarily a radical departure from the status quo of biopolitical life in slavery; often fugitivity is a fantastic sublimation and sur- rogation of slavery’s biopower that keeps the enslaved person alive in a state of social death. Turning to fugitive performance highlights biopower through the crucial vantage point of the fugitive’s life, creating a worldview that circulates in a lexicon governed by gesture, performance, and the unpredictable. Working from within, then, fugitive performance paradoxically performs biopower in order to get out from under it. 678 | American Quarterly In what follows I examine Mbembe’s formulation of necropolitics to situate how biopolitics emerges within chattel slavery. Moreover, Mbembe’s formulation of necropolitics as well as Foucault’s formulation of the “aleatory field” within biopolitics point to key concepts of performativity that further illuminate my understanding of fugitive performance as part and parcel of biopolitics. I then review what I believe are central historical and cultural doctrines of how biopolitics is deployed in slavery, namely, fugitive slave laws and fugitive codes in French colonial and US colonial slave society. I conclude the essay with a close reading of Betty’s narrative in Margaret Aurelia Porter v. Reuben Reynolds not only to put theories of biopolitical governance in direct conversation with the narrative of a fugitive slave but, more important, to insist that Betty’s narrative provides its own cutting theorization of biopolitics, a theorization that is itself fugitive performance. Necropolitical Paradox as Fugitive Performative Practice One overriding scholarly approach to understanding the life of the enslaved is to look, and rightly so, at the death function in slavery, namely, to mecha- nisms of torture that result in physical death as well as mechanisms of torture that result in what Orlando Patterson terms social death and natal alienation.8 To be situated in a state of “death-in-life” is what Mbembe has aptly termed necropolitics.
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