Abstract
What are we talking about when we talk about sovereignty? Is it about formal legitimacy or
practical authority? Does it require the ability to control the flow of people or goods
across a border; is it primarily a principle of international recognition; or does its
essence lie in the power to regulate the lives of a state's citizens? Political theorists,
historians, scholars of international relations, lawyers, anthropologists, literary critics
all approach the dilemmas of sovereign power with a mixture of urgency and frustration. In
this book, the author argues that the logic of sovereignty that emerged in early modern
Europe and that limits our thinking today must be understood as a fundamentally racialized
logic, first visible in the New World. The modern concept of sovereignty is based on a trope
of personification, the conjunction of individual and collective identities. In Grotius,
Hobbes, and others, a fiction of sovereign autonomy enabled states to be personified as
individuals, as bodies politic, even as individual humans could be imagined as miniature
states. The contradictions of this logic were fully revealed only in the New World, as
writers ranging from Aphra Behn to Thomas Jefferson and Herman Melville demonstrate. The
racialized sovereign figures examined in this book are always at once a person and a people.
They embody the connection between the individual and the collectivity, and thereby reveal
that the volatile work of sovereign personification takes place in a new world constituted
both by concepts of equality, homogeneity, and symmetry and by the realities of racial
domination and ideology in the era of colonial expansion.
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