Imoinda's Rebellion: Sovereignty, Slavery, and the Ancient Constitution in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko

• Published in: ELH Vol. 90; no. 3; pp. 639 - 666
• Main Author: Marsh, Sarah
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 01.09.2023
• Subjects: Behn, Aphra (1640-1689); British & Irish literature; Children; Colonies & territories; Death & dying; English literature; Imperialism; Ontology; Politics; Race; Racialization; Royalty; Skin; Slave trade; Slavery; Sovereignty; England; Suriname; United Kingdom > UK; West Africa; Africa
• ISSN: 0013-8304; 1080-6547; 1080-6547
• DOI: 10.1353/elh.2023.a907204

Abrupt and brutal, this scene is the fulcrum on which critical attention to sovereignty, slavery, and race in Oroonoko turns.3 Scholars' focus on the execution is noteworthy because, while spectacular, the event occupies just three paragraphs of the story. The rebellion's nuances disclose the power dynamics of sovereignty, slavery, and race in much greater detail than can be understood through Oroonoko's execution alone. To suppress this rebellion, Behn's English slavocrats redouble their claims to racial superiority in the colony, which is the power to trade people of African descent as if they are livestock.8 The English assert the animal status of all African-descended people in the colony, including hereditary royalty like Oroonoko, Imoinda, and their unborn child.9 When Behn's Africans rebel against this racialized order, some are executed—not by the king's colonial representative (who has been lost at sea), but rather by lawless factors of the slavocracy. By expositing the difference between sovereign power over life and death and the expanded slavocratic power to kill, let live, and trade, Oroonoko plots a key English political technique of colonial racialization.