Our Peculiar Institution: 12 Years a Slave, American Protestantism, and the Erotics of Racism
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Our Peculiar Institution: 12 Years a Slave, American Protestantism, and the Erotics of Racism Donovan Schaefer, Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion, Haverford College [email protected] doi:10.558/bsor.v43i1.34 Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave is mandatory view- to-one relationship between language and power is ing for all Americans, unblinkingly revisiting a cru- shown to be inadequate as an explanatory frame for cial and painful chapter in United States history the role of Christianity in the antebellum South. and helping to flesh out the genealogy of America’s Rather than an abstract ideology of race, I suggest still-tilted racial politics today. It also records a mo- religion is better understood in this film through ment in United States religious history, a phase in the lens of Holland’s notion of the erotics of racism. which white and black Protestantisms were inti- Holland in The Erotic Life of Racism (2012) proposes mately bound together but set on divergent tracks. an alliance between critical race theory and queer It illustrates how white and black Protestantisms theory, probing for ways that the frictions between developed particular strategies for managing what racialized bodies produce affects. Instead of read- Sharon Patricia Holland (2012) calls the “erotics of ing the intertwining of religion, race, and power in racism”—methods for directing the flows of shame this film in terms of discourse, I suggest, following and dignity that emerge out of America’s trauma- Holland, that it is better illustrated through an ex- tized relationships between racialized communi- ploration of the logic of affect. Rather than lying ties. in discourse, the locus of power of the set of bodily The film, based on an 1853 autobiography, follows practices called “religion” is in its ability to reorga- a free black man, Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejio- nize affects, specifically by rearranging patterns of fore), as he is lured by disguised slavers from Sara- shame and dignity. toga, NY, to Washington, DC, where slavery is still Religion is imaged in two locations in the film: legal, and then kidnapped and sold into slavery in among the slaves and among the white plantation Louisiana. He is purchased first by a fair-minded owners. For the white slave owner Epps, religion but feckless master named Ford (Benedict Cumber- becomes an affective strategy that he uses to dissolve batch), but after an altercation with Ford’s foreman, his frustrations at his own failing marriage, his mor- Solomon is sold to another plantation owned by the al uncertainty, and the vicissitudes of his life (such sadistic Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender). Epps is as a swarm of caterpillars devastating his crops) by cruel to his slaves and torments Northup for several blaming his slaves for bringing divine wrath upon years before Northup is able to send a message with him. Epps muses that there must be wickedness his whereabouts back to his family. Northup is res- among his slaves, and this is the source of hardship cued by his friends and in the closing scene reunited in his life. He sends his slaves away and when they with his family in Saratoga. return tells them that because his crops have been Religion appears in 12 Years a Slave in its conven- restored, they must have been morally and spiritu- tional costume in the antebellum era, as a discursive ally responsible for the plague. Epps in this scene is technology that slaveowners use to persuade their calm and confident; the religious architecture he has slaves to be obedient. We are shown Epps preach- created—physically and morally dividing demonic, ing to his slaves and verbally underlining a Bible wicked blacks from pure whites—has restored his verse emphasizing subservience. But this scene also sense of dignity and power. Drawing on a dim images the limitations of this analysis by showing mishmash of pre-Darwinian science and moral phi- the disconnect between discourse and power. The losophy, Epps assures one of his white workers with slaves in the film are not moved to serve by Epps’s a sneer that blacks are animals, no more reasonable sermons—by ideological mystification dazzling than the baboons in the New Orleans zoological gar- them with heavy-sounding words—but by regimes dens. Internal psychological tensions and the frus- of physical and psychological violence. The one- trations of daily life are melted down and expelled 34 BULLETIN FOR THE STUDY OF RELIGION VOLUME 43, NUMBER 1 / FEBRUARY 2014 onto bodies inhabiting a racialized/animalized zone bodies in that scene is so important that Solomon ven- beyond the sphere of whiteness. Race and religion tures enormous physical risk to achieve it. merge to become a highly effective mechanism for This scene is also significant in the way that it ex- solidifying dignity by affirming the abjection of out- hibits the change in Solomon Northup’s character, side bodies. from a risk-averse pragmatist to a passionate defend- At the same time, Christianity for whites in the film er of the victimized—and from a free black disdain- often seems to be a mechanism for the repudiation of ful of slaves to an abolitionist activist in solidarity shame itself. Providing a useful hermeneutic key for with all other blacks affected by white racism. This understanding the psychology of Southern whites in- transformation is imaged in another religious scene volved in slavery, the alcoholic laborer Armsby (Gar- in the film, the slaves singing “Roll, Jordan, Roll” at ret Dillahunt) explains that the moral crisis caused the humble slave cemetery on Epps’s plantation. Al- by his former position as an overseer drove him to though Solomon, heretofore shown as uninterested drink. Slavery is not just a material regime of vio- in religion, starts out staring down at his hands, as lence against blacks; it is a source of soul-destroying his fellow slaves raise their voices and the rhythm of shame and pain for whites. When Epps is preaching the hymn accelerates, he gradually loses himself and scripture verses to his slaves authorizing their bond- begins to sing. As Zora Neale Hurston wrote in 1934, age, McQueen shoots him in a close-up, alone with “Negro songs to be heard truly must be sung by a his Bible, his gaze buried in the thick pages. The im- group, and a group bent on expression of feelings age is a soliloquy, a self-enclosed religious dialog: and not on sound effects” (Hurston 1995, 345), In this Epps is having a conversation with himself in which he shot he is enfolded into a group he had previously tries to erase the shame of owning other human be- felt to be beneath him through an affective, embod- ings. White bodies, too, are trapped in the grinding ied gesture: the act of collective song. economic and moral engines of slavery, and use re- McQueen, who frequently places his characters ligion as a technology to dissipate their shame and in the right margin of the frame, has Solomon near pain. This in no way diminishes their complicity or the center in this shot. My argument would be that moral responsibility, but offers insight into the gene- this images the reconstitution of a center of gravity alogy of the banality of evil. within Solomon’s body through the restoration of his For the slaves, religion is a set of embodied practic- dignity. The realization that becoming a slave is not es (including discursive practices) that activates hope a source of shame enables his solidarity and camara- and rebuilds dignity. As Eugene Genovese famously derie with other oppressed black bodies. The entire argued in Roll, Jordan, Roll (1974), slave societies used shot—a static camera done in one take and lasting at religion as a strategy of resistance that reaffirmed least two minutes—is done in close-up, Solomon’s their dignity against the onslaught of white degra- face a mask of pain that remains even after he begins dation. In 12 Years a Slave, we see this prerogative to sing—but that captures a dawning sense of pas- explicitly imaged in the context of a set of embodied sion and dignity. The architecture of this image is affects. This is most dramatically exhibited in a late reprised in the final shot of the film, where Solomon scene, when Solomon desperately screams at Epps— is reunited with his family: his face is in the center of in the middle of one of Epps’s rages—that he will a cluster of black bodies, and his expression exhibits be condemned by God for his violent acts. The as- his new awareness of their shared vulnerability in a tonishing bravery of his interruption—Epps is in the white supremacist society. This visual repetition un- middle of whipping another of his slaves, Patsey (Lu- derscores that the trajectory of Solomon’s character pita Nyong’o), and he and Solomon are so physically development is driven by a complex of religion, ra- close as to be visible in the same frame—underscores cial solidarity (cutting across class lines), and affect— the affective stakes of the condemnation. Solomon, rather than discursive or ideological persuasion. powerless to protect Patsey physically, nonetheless Blacks and whites use religion as a technology interrupts the violence by invoking religion to reverse to produce and distribute affects, and the primary the current of shame in the scene: no longer is Epps currency in both spaces is dignity. But there is still degrading his naked victim; the weapon in his hand a vital difference between the two that carries into makes him the one degraded. Radically reconfigur- contemporary American evangelicalism.