Subjects of Struggle: The Intensification of White Supremacy and the Fugitive Dimensions of Black Freedom in Antebellum America

Abstract

In antebellum America, free and enslaved blacks struggled for imagined forms of freedom at a time when white supremacy’s governing authority intensified dramatically; the nation’s culture of danger exposed black bodies, minds, and souls to an expanding array of juridical, disciplinary, and regulatory techniques designed to maintain white control of governing institutions and normative democratic ideals. This dissertation explores the interplay between the intensification of white supremacy particular to antebellum America and four interconnected modes of black struggle: refusal, militancy, marronage, and rupture. These modes of black struggle are generative processes that black agents practiced in response to legal, discursive, cultural, and social mechanisms of race. I argue that modes of black struggle are expressive of a form of life – a form of thinking, feeling, acting, being – that moves within, beneath, outside, and against racial norms and techniques of control and containment. In this dissertation, I demonstrate how the experience of enslavement and black struggle in antebellum America can be understood in terms of fugitive modes of being. In the context of chattel slavery, fugitive modes of being encompass individual and communal acts of resistance that by virtue of the liminality they occupy, produce, and maintain, exceed the full force of racist instrumentalities and generate the potential for future acts of resistance and future political change.