This panel brings those lines of inquiry together, questioning how race structured the intersections between legal and literary form at a generative moment in the history of modern jurisprudence. Exploring the thesis that the imaginative surpluses of the American slave system flood the channels of representation across modern law and literature, the papers on this panel interrogate the possibility that “the construction of black humanity in slave law,” in Saidiya Hartman’s words, resonated far beyond the antebellum South to shape the way contemporary and later writers, in America and transnationally, framed questions of equity and justice, legitimacy and objectivity.
Patrick McDonald will begin by looking at the ways that lynch law was staged in two Irish-authored texts about American slavery from the mid-nineteenth century. Rather than relying on the scholarly commonplace that lynch law enforced white supremacy during this period, McDonald draws on recent studies of vigilante justice and lynching showing that extralegal violence must be understood in a transnational context that predates the so-called “lynching era.” Captain Mayne Reid’s novel The Quadroon (1856) and Dion Boucicault’s dramatic adaptation The Octoroon (1859) both conclude with not one, but two quasi-legal trials. Foregrounding the fluidity of connection among racial, legal, and state forms of identity and authority, both authors are preoccupied by the question of legal optics in the shadow of race—the question of how much the injustices of the colonial situation eroded the global legal system’s legitimacy. These texts suggest that justice is always tinged with the white supremacist reality of antebellum Louisiana, raising the question of the need for a political theology to connect revealed truth to the court’s capacity to represent transcendence.
Almas Khan continues the discussion by examining confluences between legal and literary realisms in post-Reconstruction “post-mortem novels.” While McDonald’s work examined how the representation of the Atlantic slave system cast its shadow in Irish fiction, Khan argues for an “elegiac” dimension to late nineteenth century legal and literary constitutionalism. Her analysis includes novels by lawyer-authors such as Albion Tourgée and Charles Chesnutt, and works of African American authors like Frances E. W. Harper and Sutton Griggs that elegized the recent loss of racial progress while seeking to revitalize constitutional and literary forms for a more benignant future. This multidirectional sense of memory united the literary realist project of advancing “[d]emocracy in literature” (per William Dean Howells) with the legal realists’ vision of law as a tool for social flourishing, while the same time it cast light on the inequities of legal and literary form.
Finally, Thomas Nez considers the translation of case law into poetry. In the forward to “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” (1932), modernist poet Charles Reznikoff wrote that he fashioned this strange hymn to America out of the language of “several hundred volumes of old cases.” Derived from reports of antebellum Southern court proceedings, the collection is divided between suits involving white defendants and those involving slaves, thus reproducing the differentiation of slave from “southerner” inscribed in the law of slavery. Nez shows how Reznikoff employed principles of poetic objectivism to shed light on the refracted citizenship and distorted judicial procedures of the U.S. since the antebellum period. Dissolving the local particularities of anti-black racism into the larger history of White Power, the facticity of race in case law served as a form of generative objectivity for American modernist poetry.
This panel presents new work by three younger scholars positioned in law schools, writing programs, and literature departments. In order to promote discussion while allowing the panelists to fully present their work, the panelists will be given twenty minutes apiece for their presentations, followed by fifteen minutes of open discussion.