Race Conservation and Imperial Sovereignty in Sutton Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio

Abstract

This essay examines Sutton Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio (1899) with respect to the concept of “race conservation” and debates about U.S. sovereignty in the Philippines, and demonstrates that the novel reproduced the political forms of late nineteenth-century imperial sovereignty. Exploring the relation between biopower and sovereignty, the essay argues that Griggs imagined institutions that would protect racialized populations in the United States without directly confronting U.S. sovereignty. Finally, the essay considers the unconventional form of Griggs’s novel and argues that it deliberately flattens distinctions between romance and realism, simultaneously appropriating imperialist institutional forms and undermining the aesthetic forms that conventionalized imperial violence.