The Arena of Suspension
Carrie Mae Weems, Bryan Stevenson, and the “Ground” in the Stand Your Ground Law Era
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21740490 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Sarah Elizabeth Lewis |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 33 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 487-518 |
| Publication date | 2021-09-02 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Law & Literature (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1535-685X • E-ISSN: 1541-2601 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/1535685x.2021.1930414 |
| OpenAlex | W3179469450 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
How are artists, and how are disciplines in the arts, humanities and law, responding to the hyper-visuality of racial injustices on American ground? This article explores a set of “groundwork” tactics in the Stand Your Ground Era in the United States. Stand Your Ground laws, first established in 2005, define the right to self-defense, to claim the ground on which one stands if there is a perception of “reasonable threat.” The law disproportionately affects black and brown lives today. The artworks under discussion in this article—Grace Notes: Reflections for Now by Carrie Mae Weems to honor lives lost to racial terror, and the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI)’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice to lynching—prompt the question, What does it mean to not be able to “Stand Your Ground”? What are the representational tools available to show the frequent challenge to this upright position as a statement of sovereignty over one’s own life? How has the manifold meaning of the term “ground”—as both reason, fact, but also soil itself, opened up a mode of critical inquiry to address the injustices wrought at our feet? Just as the field of environmental studies has begun to consider its nexus with racial inequity, this article approaches these representations of the “ground” through the lens of racial formation, art history, and legal study in the United States
Common ground · Economic Justice · Honor · Political science · Sociology · American Environmental and Regional History · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law
| Unique citing works | 5 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2021 - 2025 (5) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 5 |