UC Santa Cruz

This dissertation theorizes Harriet Jacobs's politics of abolitionist emancipation as a loophole in modern theories of freedom. Jacobs's narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, is an immeasurably valuable critique of the sexual politics of the peculiar institution. Our return to Jacobs wonders what additional value might be gleamed from reading her contributions to the abolitionist tradition as a social critique of slavery animated by an immanent critique of the virtues of modern political emancipation. Though most studies of Jacobs's work focus on her narrative this project places Incidents in the broader context of her Civil War writings and subsequent contributions to national reconstruction. I argue that Jacobs's slave girl protocols of emancipation shift the sexual politics of slavery's domestic order from the margins of the abolitionist tradition to its epistemic center. The question of freedom at the core of Jacobs's abolitionism directed itself to both proslavery supporters and antislavery activists alike. It was a question that asked when and for whom is self-defense a crime, and when and for whom a virtue? Her philosophy of freedom challenged conventional figurations of freedom foundational to American political theory, and anticipated analytic innovations of the twentieth century wrought to repurpose them, in particular feminist of color interventions to conventional notions of national belonging, political justice and a radical ethics of freedom.