The Violence of Economies of Dispossession in Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends

Bibliographic Data

ID11271873
AuthorsMaria Seger (University of Louisiana at Lafayette, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume49
Issue3
Pages26-47
Publication date2024-12-31
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueMELUS Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0163-755X • E-ISSN: 1946-3170
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/melus/mlae043
OpenAlexW4401836147
LanguageEN
References cited22

This article reads Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends (1857) as imagining how extralegal violence might advance economies of dispossession—those mechanisms through which capitalism racializes property, subjection, and expropriation to facilitate accumulation—in free Black communities. This claim extends work in critical ethnic studies on economies of dispossession by turning our attention to the nineteenth century. It also complements Carla L. Peterson’s reading of the novel’s imagination of Black resistance to racial capitalism with attention to the novel’s precise analysis of how racial capitalism might function. The Garies and Their Friends conceptualizes how quotidian economies of dispossession (namely, hampering intergenerational wealth transfer and proto-gentrification) rely on blatantly racist forms of extralegal violence to manufacture catastrophes that orchestrate and manage the devaluation and dispossession of Black property for accumulation by the white elite. Put another way, it illustrates how racialized and racializing extralegal violence advanced economies of dispossession through a traditional inheritance plot and an innovative displacement and proto-gentrification plot. In the novel, extralegal violence, alongside the law and legal violence, furthers dispossession by attempting to enact strict definitions of race and to regulate privately owned space. Thus, the novel points to how extralegal violence attempted to definitively contain and perform shifting and undefinable notions of race across the nineteenth century. Ultimately, attention to a more varied set of nineteenth-century forms of dispossession, alongside slavery and settler colonialism, sheds light on how capitalism’s expansion has always depended on the predation, fraud, and thievery facilitated by racialization, then as now

Economic history · Political science · Sociology · History · Modern American Literature Studies

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