Discussions surrounding the legal construction of personhood have played a germinal role in scholarship on nineteenth-century US literature and culture over the last two decades. By crafting legal fictions of personhood, nineteenth-century jurists could grant corporations rights and property while depriving Black and Indigenous people and women of those same rights. Pivotal studies such as Stephen Best’s The Fugitive’s Properties (2004) and Colin Dayan’s The Law Is a White Dog (2011) articulated how legal discourse and literary works mutually mobilized racist logics found in intellectual property statutes or in the application of the legal fiction of civil death to enslaved or incarcerated people. Conversely, Derrick R. Spires (2019) has established how Black print culture practiced and theorized new forms of citizenship that Anglo-American jurisprudence sought to suppress or failed to imagine.

This panel participates in these important conversations by examining a series of overlooked but critical US literary works circulating within the Atlantic World. Each paper tackles a different facet of the legal rhetoric and aesthetics of personhood and property by establishing how these texts grappled with “problems of fact,” racial capitalism, and coverture. To ensure that we have ample time for discussion, each presentation will be strictly limited to 18 minutes.

Erin Forbes and Cameron Seglias begin with a co-presentation on “Respectability, History, and Horror in the Early Black Atlantic.” They chart a circum-Atlantic conjuncture of history and horror with law and life writing through readings of two understudied texts whose authors were of mixed African and European descent. Sketches of the Life of Joseph Mountain tells the story of the “pre-eminent highwayman” Joseph Mountain, who was born to a formerly enslaved mother in the US and rose to prominence in the UK before being (almost certainly wrongly) convicted of rape upon his return to the US. The ultra-radical Robert Wedderburn published The Horrors of Slavery in 1824 in London to establish the truth of his origin as the free-born son of an enslaved mother and her enslaver. While both texts present copious, even at times seemingly extraneous autobiographical details, they also gloss over or omit key information. Both center around the status of contested yet crucial legal facts. These “problems of fact” establish that the key modality or genre at play here is neither historicism nor realism, both strongly associated with the African American and Black Atlantic literary traditions. Their inquiry attends to the shadow worlds the law reveals beyond the facts of history, truth, and realism to highlight the speculative possibilities of imagination, myth, and (even) horror.

In “‘A Modern Anecdote’: Enslavement, Capitalism, & Transgressive Circulation,” Duncan Faherty will examine how the anonymously authored vignette “A Modern Anecdote” (1788?) vividly exposes the hypocrisies of both early American capitalism and the early American judicial system in startling ways in the span of three brief paragraphs. He explores this document’s transgressive rhetorical maneuvers to consider it as emblematic of a range of proto-abolitionist periodical writing which depicted white supremacist capitalism as based on hypocritical juridical conceptions of property. In essence, the text features an enslaved man who demands a consistent application of the law across racial lines which results in exposing how American law could not actually reconcile the incongruent injustices it was framed to uphold.

In the final presentation, Daniel Diez Couch examines another facet of legal personhood in The Story of Constantius and Pulchera (1789-90) in “Undoing Coverture in the Early Republic.” He argues that this early American novel presents the transformation of the protagonist, Pulchera, into another character. When her ship is boarded she takes on “the character of a Lieutenant” and presents herself as a man named “Valorus.” The narrative states that she acts “under the name of VALORUS,” a phrasing that engages with discourses of coverture stretching from the medieval period to Blackstone’s Commentaries that situated women as “under” the husband. Thus, the text reverses the incorporation of the wife into the husband by taking a woman and augmenting her identity with a male, military officer. Rather than turning two individuals into one through a legal fiction, this paper reveals how the novel takes one individual and turns her into two independent ones through her own literary fiction.

This panel's presenters hail from different types of institutions in the US and Europe at different stages in their academic careers, offering a diversity of perspectives on this topic. Collectively, these papers further expand our understanding of how literary texts aided in the creation or critique of legal fictions surrounding nineteenth-century personhood in Anglo-American juridical discourse.