Destroyed Documents and Racial Vulnerability in the Literature of Slavery's Legal Afterlife
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3129267 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Valerie Sirenko (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 95 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 1-28 |
| Publication date | 2023-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Literature (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0002-9831 • E-ISSN: 1527-2117 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/00029831-10345337 |
| OpenAlex | W4313450548 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 39 |
This article argues that Black writers throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries produced a critical knowledge of how legal documentation functions to produce racialized structures of power and Black vulnerability at law. In literature that reckons with slavery's legal afterlife, particularly antebellum slave narratives, post-Reconstruction novels, and neo-slave narratives, Black authors frequently represent legal documents as pivotal to legal personhood and theorize how these documents produce vulnerability to violence and dispossession. The adversarial relationship with contract law that Black people have experienced throughout US history has uniquely positioned Black writers to produce a critical knowledge of law's structures of power. These writers reveal the mechanisms by which legal authorities manipulated the legal contracts that as texts stipulated protections for Black subjects yet in practice failed to accomplish those protections when white legal authorities refused to carry them out. Building on critical race theory and law and literature scholarship, this article proposes a heightened awareness for how race interacts with legal procedure, particularly during the material processes involved in a document's creation and execution. Focusing on law's materiality, this article uncovers an understudied literary vein in which Black authors represent documents as materially fragile and vulnerable to destruction in order to theorize law as a series of practices enacted by persons inhabiting bodies marked by race
Aesthetics · Afterlife · Art · Critical race theory · Legal fiction · Legal history · Literature · Materiality (auditing · Narrative · Personhood · Political science · Racism · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Law · Race, History, and American Society
To tell a free story
White by Law
Scenes of subjection
The Oracle and the Curse
What Blood Won't Tell
Whiteness as Property
Reconstructing Womanhood
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Telling Forgotten Stories of Slavery in the Postmodern South
The Strange Career of Love and Slavery
Introduction
From Bondage to Contract
Dark Matters
The alchemy of race and rights
The Private Law of Race and Sex
The Coupling Convention
Neither Fugitive nor Free
The New Jim Crow
The Question of Recovery
Mapping the Margins
Family Money
Civic Longing
Crystals and Mud in Property Law
Harriet Jacobs and the Recirculation of Print Culture
Speculative Fictions of Slavery
Activist Sentiments
I Was Born
Residues of Justice
Venus in Two Acts
Thing Theory
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2024 - 2026 (3) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |