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

Abstract

Imoinda's RebellionSovereignty, Slavery, and the Ancient Constitution in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko Sarah Marsh Indeed, the attribution of divinity to the king had probably always been motivated in some measure by the desire to limit him to actions becoming a god. —Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America Oroonoko was no sooner return'd from his last Conquest, and receiv'd at Court … like a Deity, when there arriv'd in the Port an English Ship. —Aphra Behn, Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave1 In her 1688 novel, Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave, Aphra Behn writes of an African divine-right prince and his wife, Imoinda, who die as insurrectionists instead of living as slaves in English colonial Surinam. These characters' heroic lives and tragic deaths have led readers to study Oroonoko's transoceanic dynamics between a contested, divine-right monarchy in Stuart England and the development of chattel, racial slavery in its colonies. The consensus on this aspect of the novel remains best summarized by Laura Brown's 1987 insight that "both Charles I and Oroonoko are victims of the same historical phenomenon—those new forces in English society loosely associated with an antiabsolutist mercantile imperialism."2 Charles I and Oroonoko are similar, that is, because they are overthrown by anti-monarchical proponents of England's commercial empire. This consensus arises from scholars' appraisal of Oroonoko's execution by English slavocrats at the end of the novel, which bears unmistakable likeness to the regicide of 1649. Abrupt and brutal, this scene is the fulcrum on which critical attention to sovereignty, [End Page 639] 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. By contrast, the slave rebellion in Oroonoko—which also dramatizes the relation of sovereignty, slavery, and race—is typically noticed only in passing.4 And yet: this rebellion consumes the attention of Oroonoko's narrator and directs the novel's plot. Imoinda's justification for the rebellion, a moral claim in herself against sovereign and slaveholding tyranny, coordinates the novel's dual episodes in Coramantien and Surinam. Both the rebellion and its suppression are framed by a racializing vocabulary through which Africans, regardless of social rank, are animalized into chattels along the color line. Imoinda, consort to the Coramantee heir apparent Oroonoko, rebels to stop her family's chattelization by the English; in turn, the English retrench in the colony by animalizing Oroonoko. 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. This essay's fundamental claim is that the slave rebellion in Oroonoko is a comprehensive study of how anti-tyrannicism, exemplified by Imoinda, collapses under the evolving colonial pressures of chattel-racialization. By "anti-tyrannicism," I mean the early modern political discourse that pitted itself against tyranny, or arbitrary absolute power. Drawing on Kurt A. Raaflaub's work, Mary Nyquist describes anti-tyrannicism as an ideology that "represents the tyrant's subjects as figuratively enslaved—enslavement that seeks to dishonor and disenfranchise citizens who are meant to be 'free.'"5 Nyquist underscores that this "political slavery needs to be differentiated from the chattel slavery against which it asserts its claims" because "political slavery has its own unique logic and codes, none of which arise from concern for those who are actually enslaved."6 At the same time, "political servitude… is not inherently independent of chattel slavery or indifferent to its legitimacy."7Because Oroonoko's plot mixes the categories of political and chattel slavery—sometimes beyond distinction—anti-tyrannicism offers a comprehensive rubric for evaluating the narrative's political meanings. Behn's novel consummates chattel-racialization's defeat of antityrannicism when Oroonoko, who ultimately accepts the racial logic of slavocrats, kills Imoinda, who resists sovereign and slaveholding tyranny. Behn arranges this ideological battle by writing Imoinda [End Page 640] as an African and sometimes enslaved woman, who asserts a moral claim in her reproductive body against sovereign prerogative at home and slavocratic interests abroad. Imoinda thus embodies anti-tyrannicism as a...