In this paper, I offer a neo-Marxist reading of Charles Johnson's Middle Passage (1990), departing from both the existentialist readings of self-discovery and the humanist readings of cross-cultural encounter. Drawing on theories of Louis Althusser, Antonio Gramsci, and Fredric Jameson, I argue that Johnson’s novel stages how racial capitalism functions through the reduction of human beings to cargo, how resistance under conditions of total commodification is always circumscribed by the ideological parameters of the system, and how the slave ship itself operates as a material and symbolic space of structural rupture a microcosm of the capitalist world-system in which human beings are transformed into commodities, consciousness is alienated from labor, and the very categories of freedom and bondage become indistinguishable. What is important in the conclusion of the novel is not Rutherford Calhoun’s journey toward self-knowledge but the exposure of the ideological labor that makes chattel slavery into economic progress and the commodification of humans into the natural order.
Nirmal Gurung (Sun,) studied this question.