“The Shadow of the Cloud”: Racial Speculation and Cultural Vision in Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave

Abstract

This chapter argues that as a narrative of kidnap rather than birth into slavery, Solomon Northup’s historical predicament dramatizes the rhetorical predicament of all ex-slave narrators. Northup is a free man who has been mistaken for a slave. This is, in existential terms, the condition of all ex-slave narrators: although they have been treated as objects, they must prove to their readers that this is a fundamental misrecognition, that they have been subjects all along. The chapter argues that Northup challenges this visual mistake by producing two contradictory strains within his narrative: he meticulously executes the authenticating requirements that restore his freedom and fulfill the literary expectations of authenticity, while evacuating those conventions of racial meaning through a series of visual metaphors and scenes of witnessing that reveal the absurdity of the racial logic motivating the conventions of authentication.