Notes toward a Political Economy of Life and Death

Abstract

Building on his previous analysis of the short stories in Wright’s anthology Uncle Tom’s Children, Abdul R. JanMohamed reflects on Wright’s gradual discovery of a close relationship between social death, actual death, and symbolic death. Because “primitive accumulation” refers not only to the material dispossession of the slave’s world but also to the appropriation of subjectivity, questions arise about whether an ex-slave can repossess psycho-political and sociopolitical components of subjectivity in Jim Crow societies that operate predominantly through the inculcation of widespread fear. Against the poststructuralist doxa about the decentered subject and the need to abolish “identity politics,” JanMohamed insists that individual subjects are driven to center themselves and to make their lives as coherent as possible. This is especially true in contexts of colonization, racialization, genderization, and enslavement that rely on disrupting the attempts by oppressed people to control their daily practices.