Rather, enslavement — the inaugural enterprise for the age of Europe, the precondition for the American century and its coveted sequel — is enabled by and dependent on the most basic of operations: symbolic and material immobilization, the absolute divestment of sovereignty at the site of the black body: its freedom of movement, its conditions of labor, its physical and emotional sustenance, its social and sexual reproduction, its political and cultural representation. Beyond its economic utility, this rendering of the black as the object of dispossession par excellence — object of accumulation, prototypical commodity, captive flesh — structures indelibly the historical proliferation of modern conceptions of sovereignty that now dominate political and legal discourse globally and provide the crucial frames of intelligibility for both imperialism and anti-imperialism, empire and its discontents. With blacks barred by definition from the very notion of the sovereign (whatever their nominal legal status, wherever their tentative place of residence), those not marked by the material and symbolic stigma of slavery have the exclusive and positive capacity to debate about sovereignty: to trivialize its importance and rationalize its violation or to struggle in its defense, to name and lament its loss, and wage war for its recovery.
Blacks, then, suffer a peculiar relation to the U.S. empire in the historic instance: neither its subjects (certainly not its authors or beneficiaries) nor its objects (at least not in the most direct sense).