Interrogating Oroonoko: Torture in a New World and a New Fiction of Power
This article interrogates the function and effect of the penultimate paragraph of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, where Oroonoko is tortured and executed. Reading the scene through the prism of European practices of ritual punishment and judicial torture as well as New World uses of torture, I argue that the scene cannot be read, as many critics have, as one of martyrdom. Rather, the scene emerges as closer in its rhetorical aims to those articulated by Elaine Scarry in her seminal analysis of torture, The Body in Pain (1985). As is the case with judicial and modern torture, Behn deliberately produces a body in pain in order to give legitimacy to the truth of her own narrative. Yet, in opposition to that brutal practice, she simultaneously exposes the fictional nature of her own narrative power. She reminds the reader of the violence inherent in any appropriation of another’s story for one’s own political or literary ends, and in the process paradoxically produces one of the first modern, democratic subjects.
Dismembering the Sovereign in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko
Abstract:The final scene of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave has long been considered one of the most challenging moments in the text: not only does it blend depictions of colonial slavery and royalist sovereignty in surprising and disturbing ways, but it also appears to resist any straightforward political signification. This essay argues that the ending scene dramatizes an erasure of civil life and breakdown of political meaning reflective of contemporary tensions between the dissolving stability of sovereign rule and simultaneous rising forces of colonialism and biopolitics.
Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched
Chapter 1 1 Between the New Medium and the Old Chapter 2 2 The Promise of the Digital Revolution Chapter 3 3 Rediscovering Reality Chapter 5 4 The Kinder, Gentler Gaze of Big Brother Chapter 6 5 Access to the Real Chapter 7 6 It's All About the Experience Chapter 8 7 Reality TV and Voyeurism Chapter 9 8 Survivor and Uncanny Capitalism Chapter 10 Bibliography