What are we talking about when we talk about sovereignty? Is it about formal legitimacy or practical authority? This title 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.
Focusing on the figure of the royal slave, the captive African king, or the last Indian chief in literature from Aphra Behn to Herman Melville, On Lingering and Being Last draws on recent examinations of the notion of sovereignty to introduce a new theory of race. The racialized sovereign individual, the author argues, is a projection and working out of a logic of sovereignty in early modern Europe, in which states were conceived as individuals-bodies politic-at the very moment individual humans strove to appropriate that sovereign autonomy for themselves. The volatile work of these personifications-Oroonoko and his epigones, Logan and his avatars-takes place in a new world setting that is founded simultaneously ona concept of equality-the powerfully deterritorializing ideal of liberal indiviudualism-andon the realities of racial domination and ideology in the era of colonial expansion.
