Agency, Politics, and the “Impossible Domestic”: A Response to Walter Johnson’s “On Agency”

Walter Johnson’s point about “agency” can be extended to other central concepts of historical analysis: what might appear as a salutary extension of a foundational category of liberal democracy to the histories of enslaved people in fact forces those histories into frameworks that are, ultimately, those of enslavers. The interconnected insights of Black feminism and Queer theory—particularly about “domestic institutions”—suggest that politics is another of those categories that, like agency, risks forcing the histories of enslaved people into analytic categories of an ultimately white-supremacist liberalism.