First the Streets, Then the Archives

Our work as legal historians is to explore those sites where history’s unspeakable, inexpressible past still lives. This essay follows the suggestion of Joseph Roach to go beyond the archives to “spend more time in the streets.” This essay asks how to explain the fact of homeless people living in the shadows of New York City’s Housing Court. We might cringe, furrow our brows, and avert our gazes from the homeless encampment. Or, we might pause to ask a question about how the sight of human beings huddled in cardboard boxes is a sign of the past. Then we can return to the courthouse archives where we learn how the dynamics of race, power, and inequality have always lived there.

Aesthetics · Art · Criminology · Lived experience · Political science · Power (physics) · Psychoanalysis · Race (biology) · Sight · Sign (mathematics) · Sociology · Cuban History and Society · Gender Studies · History · Law · Law in Society and Culture · Psychology