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Scenes of Speculation: Harriet Jacobs and the Biopolitics of Human Capital
- American Quarterly
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 71, Number 3, September 2019
- pp. 697-718
- 10.1353/aq.2019.0050
- Article
- Additional Information
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Abstract:
This essay reads forms of "premature knowing" in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) in relation to the nineteenth-century economy in slave reproductivity. Claiming that Jacobs's story exemplifies strategies of resistance that become possible at a critical remove from both traditional gender roles and legal personhood defined through self-possession, the essay demonstrates how Jacobs develops a counterlogic of finance that she uses against her oppressors. The essay situates this counterlogic within a genealogy of neoliberal human capital that traces its development on both sides of the color line and in relation to the history of labor free and unfree. Identifying a key genealogical antecedent to human capital in the speculative market in reproductive slavery, the essay argues that Jacobs's self-investment practice seeks not to possess the self but to free it from possession. Hence the essay positions Jacobs's narrative as part of a counterhistory of American liberalism and as a crucial index for theorizing a biopolitics of the unfree.