Power and Resistance in Steve McQueen's "12 Years a Slave" (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2020 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Other, , language: English, abstract: The research question of this paper focuses on the relation between power and resistance within McQueen's movie by incorporating Foucault's notion that power is reversible and always brings along resistance.

I argue that power as well as power relations change through practiced forms of resistance. For my analysis of Solomon's confrontations with white power and strategies of resistance in the movie, I will first illustrate Foucault's theory of power and resistance, followed by a depiction of control and slave resistance in antebellum American slavery. Finally, I will analyse how power and resistance are displayed in the movie.

Although the United States Constitution declares all human beings as equal individuals, white people of European descent regarded themselves as superior compared to people of different ancestry, especially to Blacks. Blacks were not even regarded as human beings and furthermore treated as objects and "legal property" of white people. This derives from the notion of race as an indicating signifier, categorising people based on supposed biological characteristics, including skin colour.

Moreover, race is not a universal concept; rather, it forms "a contingent and unstable cultural category with which people identify". With its prejudicial connotation, the cultural studies concept of race roots in the misbalanced hierarchical power distribution between colonialists and subjected people. Thus, colonialists referred to themselves as 'civilized people', distinguishing from the 'primitive' subject and thereby hierarchised human types.

The dominant groups' assumed superiority results in the suppression of the recessive subject by ranking social groups within a hierarchical system of both material and social inferiority and superiority. This leads to the view of race being a cultural instead of a biological phenomenon. Consequently, black people suffered from Whites who maximised their power by inhumane laws and forces as they wanted to restrain and dominate the black mass during antebellum American slavery.