Even under total possession the enslaved refashion objects and bodies into self-making performance.

Evidence

Treated as if he or she no longer existed except as a mere tool and instrument of production, the slave nevertheless is able to draw almost any object, instrument, language, or gesture into a performance and then stylize it. Breaking with uprootedness and the pure world of things of which he or she is but a fragment, the slave is able to demonstrate the protean capabilities of the human bond through music and the very body that was supposedly possessed by another. — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 67

Categorization

• XREF: Resonates with Hartman’s ‘Scenes of Subjection’ and with the reader’s scaffolding module on racialized selfhood. — connects to: The slave condition dissolves personhood into property, making a life a thing possessed. — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 65; Possession aims at appropriating being-in-itself and symbolically the whole world. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1381
• FICTION: The image of the slave stylizing ‘the very body supposedly possessed by another’ is a charged narrative kernel about resistance through performance.
• STORYSTEM: A story could center on an enslaved musician whose body — legally another’s — becomes the site where freedom is rehearsed through rhythm and gesture.