Disturbing the Peace

What does black vernacular expression have to do with either the law or the police powers? Everything, Bryan Wagner's monograph compellingly argues. Through an extended meditation on the correlations between the end of slavery and the rise of the police powers in the United States, which shows the latter's contingency upon the former, Wagner examines the early formation of black vernacular expression and the complications surrounding the documentation and representation of this foundational aspect of the black tradition. Wagner's approach refutes the claim that the black tradition cannot be represented. Using the same examples (Robert Charles, Bras Coupé, Uncle Remus) that others have used to frame discussions of black vernacular expression, Wagner examines the tradition's engagement with the law and turns the readers’ attention toward the legal history surrounding black vernacular tradition to show that one may “specify the historical statement against which the black tradition has dramatized its own emergence” since the law “leaves a paper trail that can be used to reconstruct the historical coordinates that invoked in the traditions’ representative structure of self-address” (p. 21). Navigating the contours of legal history, Wagner shows the unerring ways that terms such as “vagrant,” “migrant,” or “outlaw”—which describe characters that figure prominently in black vernacular expression—came to have dark underpinnings and came to represent blacks, who were perceived as societal threats in need of policing

Art · Expression (computer science · Literature · Political science · Power (physics · Sociology · Vernacular · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society