Envisioning Intent: Models of Biopolitical Carnival in Benito Cereno and Heart of Darkness.

My project extends Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the literary carnival, which destabilizes life's hierarchies, to become the biopolitical carnival, which disrupts life's regularization under biopolitics. Taking what I term to be inverse models of biopolitical carnival in Benito Cereno (the intentional carnival) and Heart of Darkness (the carnival of intent), my analysis is concerned with both text's use of illumination as constitutive narrative strategy and with linking institutions of colonialism and slavery to theories of biopolitics.