Duplicity: Kidnapping and the Problem of Evidence in Solomon Northup's Twelve Years a Slave

This essay argues that Solomon Northup's Twelve Years a Slave presents slavery as a problem for interpretation, demonstrating that what secures the relationship between evidence and assertion in racial slavery is force. Moreover, slavery's tautology is embedded in national law. However, Northup presents an outside to this closed logical system. The essay's key intervention is to read the narrative against its chronological emplotment to uncover the fundamental duality of Northup's text and life: Northup is simultaneously free and enslaved throughout, regardless of his location or relationship to legal documents. As a victim of kidnap, Northup is always rightfully free though he is mistaken for a slave; simultaneously, after his kidnapping he understands that even in freedom he is always subject to enslavement as a Black man in the United States. The instability of his ontological status—as simultaneously enslaved and free—presents the limit to the totalizing view of the kidnapers and the state. The essay recovers Northup's perspective as someone who did not previously understand himself to be a potential slave as a refusal to flatten interpretation to a single plane.