Political Principles and Ideologies in Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage

Abstract

Set on a slave ship in 1830, Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage opposes the political model of Captain Ebenezer Falcon, who incarnates the conquering spirit and ruthless mercantile culture of the United States, to the political model of the Allmuseri, an African tribe of which forty members are shackled in the hold. Presented as pacifist and egalitarian, the Allmuseri will prove as bellicose and self-serving as their oppressors once in control of the ship. This essay demonstrates that both political models are in fact similar in nature as they have Utopian foundations whose ideals their proponents could never live up to and yet still claim to live for.

Keywords

• transatlantic slave trade
• manifest destiny
• Puritanism
• exceptionalism
• utopia
• heterotopia