Imperial Mimicry and Racial Regression in Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones

초록

This paper reads Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1920) as an expressionist drama that organizes Black Atlantic history through staged regression. Moving beyond interpretations that treat the forest flight as either psychological breakdown or modernist primitivism, it argues that the play structures Jones’s movement through penal discipline, slave commodification, the Middle Passage, and ritual sacrifice as a historically sequenced process. Expressionist devices such as monologue, rhythmic intensification, distorted space, and recurrent sound transform fear into a theatrical encounter with racial history, rendering Atlantic modernity visible on stage. Drawing on W. E. B. Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness, Homi K. Bhabha’s account of colonial mimicry, and Paul Gilroy’s theorization of the Black Atlantic, the paper examines how divided subjectivity and imperial performance emerge from transatlantic histories of slavery and empire. It further argues that Jones’s rule over Afro-Caribbean subjects reveals a diasporic form of internal colonialism in which imperial relations circulate within Black Atlantic space. The final section considers the witch-doctor ritual as a site where collective racial memory intersects with modernist primitivism, exposing both the critical force and the representational limit of O’Neill’s modernism. The paper ultimately suggests that American expressionism in The Emperor Jones is inseparable from the histories of racial violence that it organizes, stages, and renders audible.