Full Description
In Legal Fictions, Karla FC Holloway both argues that U.S. racial identity is the creation of U.S. law and demonstrates 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 masterful 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 into the twenty-first centuries. Legal Fictions is a bold declaration that the black body is thoroughly bound by law and an unflinching look at the implications of that claim.
Contents
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
