The Fugitive's Properties: Law and the Poetics of PossessionUniversity of Chicago Press, 15/05/2010 - 376 páginas In this study of literature and law before and since the Civil War, Stephen M. Best shows how American conceptions of slavery, property, and the idea of the fugitive were profoundly interconnected. The Fugitive's Properties uncovers a poetics of intangible, personified property emerging out of antebellum laws, circulating through key nineteenth-century works of literature, and informing cultural forms such as blackface minstrelsy and early race films. Best also argues that legal principles dealing with fugitives and indebted persons provided a sophisticated precursor to intellectual property law as it dealt with rights in appearance, expression, and other abstract aspects of personhood. In this conception of property as fleeting, indeed fugitive, American law preserved for much of the rest of the century slavery's most pressing legal imperative: the production of personhood as a market commodity. By revealing the paradoxes of this relationship between fugitive slave law and intellectual property law, Best helps us to understand how race achieved much of its force in the American cultural imagination. A work of ambitious scope and compelling cross-connections, The Fugitive's Properties sets new agendas for scholars of American literature and legal culture. |
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Página xii
... matters came to a head in 2003 when I had the opportunity to collaborate with Saidiya on the orga- nization of the Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar/HRI research seminar “Redress in Law, Literature, and Social Thought”; a more rigorous ...
... matters came to a head in 2003 when I had the opportunity to collaborate with Saidiya on the orga- nization of the Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar/HRI research seminar “Redress in Law, Literature, and Social Thought”; a more rigorous ...
Página 3
... matter - of - fact reality , acted out every day wherever and whenever a negro or anyone else is claimed as an American slave ” ( 28 ) . I would charge otherwise , that “ metaphysical subtlety ” and “ fiction of ... law ” are incapable ...
... matter - of - fact reality , acted out every day wherever and whenever a negro or anyone else is claimed as an American slave ” ( 28 ) . I would charge otherwise , that “ metaphysical subtlety ” and “ fiction of ... law ” are incapable ...
Página 9
... matter what the fictions of law may say ; but the right to his labor is property , and may be transferred like any other property.2 20 ( E. N. ELLIOT , 1860 ) This perception that slavery's “ bundle of rights ” attached to the slave's ...
... matter what the fictions of law may say ; but the right to his labor is property , and may be transferred like any other property.2 20 ( E. N. ELLIOT , 1860 ) This perception that slavery's “ bundle of rights ” attached to the slave's ...
Página 14
... matter , I engage these questions of slavery here as matters of aesthetic and legal representation — as an aesthetics of legal representa- tion — and route these concerns through the historical frame of transforma- tions in the ...
... matter , I engage these questions of slavery here as matters of aesthetic and legal representation — as an aesthetics of legal representa- tion — and route these concerns through the historical frame of transforma- tions in the ...
Página 15
... matter of conduct , as a variable of personhood — comes into focus in nineteenth - century courts prima facie as the law of chattel slavery , specifically the law pertaining to fugitive slave persons . I propose that the alienation of ...
... matter of conduct , as a variable of personhood — comes into focus in nineteenth - century courts prima facie as the law of chattel slavery , specifically the law pertaining to fugitive slave persons . I propose that the alienation of ...
Índice
1 | |
27 | |
Chapter Two The Fugitives Properties Uncle Toms Incalculable Dividend | 99 |
Chapter Three Counterfactuals Causation and the Tenses of Separate but Equal | 201 |
The Rules of the Game | 269 |
Notes | 277 |
Index | 353 |
Outras edições - Ver tudo
The Fugitive's Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession Stephen M. Best Pré-visualização limitada - 2004 |
The Fugitive's Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession Stephen M. Best Pré-visualização indisponível - 2004 |
Palavras e frases frequentes
abstraction aesthetic Amendment appears authority autopoesis blackface body cakewalk Cambridge capital causation century Chicago cinema claim clause common law conception Constitution contract corporation counterfactual credit economy culture doctrine Dred Scott duden economic equal protection Essays exchange expression fiction figure film Fourteenth Amendment Fugitive Slave Fugitive Slave Law Harriet Beecher Stowe Holmes imagination intellectual property interest Jeremy Bentham Justice labor language Law Review law's literary logic matter means ment metaphor metonymy minstrel moral musical narrative natural Negro nineteenth-century object Oliver Wendell Holmes original Oxford passion person personhood play Plessy political principle production property law property rights race racial rational relation repetition reprint rhetoric sentiment slavery social specific speculative Stanley Fish Stowe Stowe's theft theory thing tion Tom’s Topsy Tourgée trans transformation translation turn-of-the-century U.S. Supreme Court Uncle Tom's Cabin University Press words York
Passagens conhecidas
Página 10 - A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law. Being the mere creature of law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it, either expressly or as incidental to its very existence.
Página 217 - The argument necessarily assumes that if, as has been more than once the case,' and is not unlikely to be so again, the colored race should become the dominant power in the state legislature, and should enact a law in precisely similar terms, it would thereby relegate the white race to an inferior position. We imagine that the white race, at least, would not acquiesce in this assumption.
Página 69 - And no word can be found in the Constitution which gives Congress a greater power over slave property, or which entitles property of that kind to less protection than property of any other description.
Página 171 - ... and with proof, also by affidavit, of the identity of the person whose service or labor is claimed to be due as aforesaid, that the person so arrested does in fact owe service or labor to the person or persons claiming him or her, in the state or territory from which such fugitive may have escaped as aforesaid...
Página 275 - Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.
Página 10 - It is chiefly for the purpose of clothing bodies of men in succession with these qualities and capacities that corporations were invented and are in use. By these means, a perpetual succession of individuals are capable of acting for the promotion of the particular object, like one immortal being.
Página 217 - A]mendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but, in the nature of things, it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguish distinguished from political equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either.
Página 159 - By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him...
Página 173 - What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.
Referências a este livro
Courting Failure: Women and the Law in Twentieth-century Literature Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson Visualização de excertos - 2007 |
Formalism, Experience, and the Making of American Literature in the ... Theo Davis Pré-visualização indisponível - 2007 |