Special Section: “On Agency” at Twenty ANGELA ELISABETH ZIMMERMAN Agency, Politics, and the “Impossible Domestic”: A Response to Walter Johnson’s “On Agency”* Abstract 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 inter- connected 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. What I take to be the central point of Walter Johnson’s “On Agency” remains as incisive today as it was twenty years ago: by thematizing the category of agency, the ability to perform consequential actions intentionally, scholars obscure rather than illuminate the histories of enslaved people. They obscure those histories, in the first place, rhetorically: the force with which some histori- ans assert that enslaved people possessed agency implies, Johnson observes, that this is not a simple and indubitable fact but rather a topic about which reason- able people might disagree. In effect, these historians—quite contrary to their intentions—call into question whether enslaved people, and perhaps even all people of African descent, were human beings at all. The assertion that enslaved people possessed agency is thus not merely a banality, but, to riff on Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase, an evil banality. 1 But were the evil of banality the only problem with the assertion that enslaved people had agency, then historians would need to do little more than stop making it, cutting a few sentences to ren- der harmful texts harmless. But of course there is more. The assertation that enslaved people had agency is also a contradiction in terms. Agency, Johnson emphasizes, is not some transhistorical human trait but rather a concept specific, indeed fundamental, to nineteenth-century liberalism, and a concept, moreover, that liberals defined in binary opposition to slavery. Thus, to assert that enslaved people had agency is to enter the political terrain of liberalism—even if only to contest one of its constituent exclusions. To do so may appear to be an obviously correct choice, at least to liberals, who Journal of Social History (2023), 1–6 https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shad065 © The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jsh/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jsh/shad065/7469064 by George Washington University user on 11 December 2023