N°021_Vol.5_18

Introduction: In 1884, Mark Twain publishes Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a milestone in American literature in which the figure of the runaway slave, Jim, serves as a moral catalyst for the young white protagonist. Yet, despite Twain’s sympathy, Jim remains a literary subject condemned to the periphery, a passive projection whose speech is filtered through a caricatured dialect. One hundred and forty years later, Percival Everett makes a major epistemological break with his novel James (2024). By shifting the narrative focus to the slave, Everett is not satisfied with a simple rewriting; he proceeds to a literary exhumation. Twain’s stereotypical “Jim” fades away to reveal “James”, a subject with a highly philosophical conscience and a perfect command of the language of the oppressor, which he jealously conceals in the presence of white people. The tension between the performance of submission and the reality of the inner life invites to theorize what may be called the living Shadow. In the context of antebellum America, this spectrality of the Black man is not accidental, it is the direct product of what Achille Mbembe (2019) calls necropolitics. According to Mbembe, the slave regime represents one of the most radical manifestations of state sovereignty, a power that is defined by the right to decide who should live and who should die. Under this paradigm, the slave is kept in a zone of permanent “social death”, deprived of legal status, genealogy and voice. So, how can a subject trapped in this architecture of death preserve his ontology?

This study tries to bring forward the idea that the slave is no longer an experimental subject, but an architect of his own history. It posits that in Percival Everett’s James, ghost identity does not represent a submissively endured psychological alienation under necropolitical oppression; rather, it constitutes a deliberate counter-hegemonic strategy of survival and cognitive sovereignty through which the enslaved subject reclaims historical agency. In this case, dialectal performance and code-switching function as a conscious discursive mask that preserves the protagonist James’ inner literacy while blinding white sovereign power. The Mississippi river operates as a chronotropic liminal space enabling the runaway slave’s fragmented psyche to decompress, rebuild, and articulate a hybrid identity outside the plantation. The act of writing allows the protagonist to break the necropolitical decree of obliteration, transforming nineteenth-century literary ghost into an empowered historical subject. To examine these hypotheses, the analysis relies on interdisciplinary literary methodology. It combines close reading with Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics (2019) to unpack how sovereign power dictates “social death” in the plantation regime. Focusing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s chronotope (1981) and Chap Nilep’s sociolinguistic model of code-switching (2006), the analysis evaluates how language and spaciality function as tools of resistance

Classical literary criticism often perceives the invisibility or psychological doubling of the African-American subject, theorized by W.E.B. Du Bois. He presents the concept of “double consciousness” as a tragic and suffered psychological mutilation. The aim of this article is to reverse this perspective. The analysis supports the thesis that, in James, ghost identity is not a pathological alienation, but a strategy of counter-power and existential sovereignty. By voluntarily fragmenting himself through a strict code-switching, the protagonist Jim agrees to perform the “social death” demanded by white power to transform his cognitive invisibility into a shield of survival. His shadow becomes his best weapon. To demonstrate this hypothesis, this research paper is structured around three critical axes. First, the study examines the anatomy of this discursive mask by showing how the character James sabotages the necropolitics of the plantation through subversive linguistic mimicry. Second, it explores the geography of the novel by analyzing the Mississippi River as a liminal space, a zone of chronotropic decompression where the fragmented psyche of the slave frees itself from sovereign jurisdiction. then, the analysis evaluates the final appropriation of writing as an act of ontological resurrection, by which the literary spectrum of the nineteenth century is exorcised by ink to impose itself as a sovereign historical subject of the twenty-first century.