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Legal Fictions: Constituting Race, Composing Literature
- Author(s): Karla FC Holloway
- Published: 2014
- Pages: 176
- Illustrations: 3 photographs
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- Preface ix
- Introduction: Bound by Law 1
- Intimate Intersectionalities—Scalar Reflections 5
- Public Fictions, Private Facts 9
- Simile as Precedent 13
- Property, Contract, and Evidentiary Values 17
- 1. The Claims of Property: On Being and Belonging 23
- The Capital in Question 27
- Imagined Liberalism 35
- Mapping Racial Reason 41
- Being in Place: Landscape, Never Inscape 49
- 2. Bodies as Evidence (of Things Not Seen) 55
- Secondhand Tales and Hearsay 59
- Black Legibility—Can I Get a Witness? 72
- Trying to Read Me 77
- 3. Composing Contract 89
- "A novel-like tenor" 93
- Passing and Protection 96
- A Secluded Colored Neighborhood 102
- Epilogue. When and Where "All the Dark-Glass Boys" Enter 111
- A Contagion of Madness 113
- Notes 127
- References 139
- Acknowledgments 145
- Index 147
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"In this wonderful book, Karla FC Holloway illuminates legal texts with techniques and insights derived from literary criticism and offers new interpretations of fictional works by bringing to bear upon them knowledge derived from a deep immersion in legal studies. This is, in short, a remarkable example of productive interdisciplinarity from which all sorts of readers will learn a great deal."—Randall Kennedy, author of Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption
"Legal Fictions represents a culmination (if not the culmination) of Karla FC Holloway's rich corpus of criticism and theory. As a consideration of law and literature in the construction of race and legal fictions, it is an original intervention sure to inform understandings of, and scholarship about, both. This book is Holloway at her best: intelligent and thoughtful, fully in command of the critical vocabularies that she introduces, and thoroughly knowledgeable about the fields that she traverses."—Farah Jasmine Griffin, author of If You Can't Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday
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Description
In Legal Fictions, Karla FC Holloway argues that U.S. racial identity is the creation of U.S. law, and she shows how black authors of literary fiction have engaged with the law's constructions of race since the era of slavery. Exploring the resonance between U.S. literature and U.S. jurisprudence, Holloway reveals Toni Morrison's Beloved and Charles Johnson's Middle Passage as stories about personhood and property, David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man as structured by evidence law, and Nella Larsen's Passing as intimately related to contract law. Holloway engages the intentional, contradictory, and capricious constructions of race embedded in the law with the same energy that she brings to her bravura interpretations of fiction by U.S. writers. Her readings shed new light on the many ways that black U.S. authors have reframed fundamental questions about racial identity, personhood, and the law from the nineteenth century into the twenty-first. Legal Fictions is a bold declaration that the black body is thoroughly bound by law and an unflinchingly look at the implications of that claim.
About The Author(s)
Karla FC Holloway is James B. Duke Professor of English at Duke University, where she also holds appointments in the Law School, Women's Studies, and African & African American Studies, and is an affiliated faculty with the Institute on Care at the End of Life and the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities & History of Medicine. She serves on the Greenwall Foundation's Advisory Board in Bioethics, was recently elected to the Hastings Center Fellows Association. Holloway is the author of BookMarks: Reading in Black and White and Codes of Conduct: Race, Ethics, and the Color of Our Character, as well as Private Bodies, Public Texts: Race, Gender, and a Cultural Bioethics and Passed On: African American Mourning Stories: A Memorial, both also published by Duke University Press.
