Žižekian Ideology and the ‘Sympathetic’ Slave-Owner: Ostensible Necessity of Slavery in Our Nig and Minnie’s Sacrifice

Abstract

I will look at and discuss the ideological-subject position of the ‘sympathetic’ slave-owner by employing  Žižek’s specific conception of ideology across two varying slave-narratives. I attempt to uncover how this ideology operates within the social-material reality in the texts Our Nig and Minnie's Sacrifice and the ways that the authors (Harper and Wilson) employed tropes in depicting this particular archetypal figure in slave-narratives. These charachter's exhibit an ideology remarkably aligned with Žižek’s: that a certain non-knowledge of the proper logic of an ideological reality is what sustains it. This suggests not only that such an archetypal figure exists across slave-narratives, but also that they deploy a communal ideology that attempts to conflate unwillingness with inability. They enable the perpetuation of the institution by their unwillingness to reject the economic benefits of slavery, which they conceive of as an inability.