SOURCE: Fagel, Brian. “Passages from the Middle: Coloniality and Postcoloniality in Charles Johnson's Middle Passage.” African American Review 30, no. 4 (winter 1996): 625-34.

In the following essay, Fagel explores the role of the central character in The Middle Passage as a “middleman” between competing forces in the colonial power structure.

I know that if I want to smoke, I shall have to reach out my right arm and take the pack of cigarettes lying at the other end of the table. The matches, however, are in the drawer on the left, and I shall have to lean back slightly. And all these movements are made not out of habit but out of implicit knowledge. A slow composition of my self as a body in the middle of a spatial and temporal world—such seems to be the schema.

(Fanon 111)

The book is filled all but a finger's breadth. I shall...