Hot off the presses! Jan 01 Am Lit

The Jan 01 issue of the Am Lit is now up on Pubget (About Am Lit): if you're at a subscribing institution, just click the link in the latest link at the home page. (Note you'll only be able to get all the PDFs in the issue if your institution subscribes to Pubget.)

Latest Articles Include:

• "Freedom with a Vengeance": Choosing Kin in Antislavery Literature and Law
  - Am Lit 81(1):7-34 (2009)
  Wong's essay charts the legal controversies over slaves brought into New England after Massachusetts Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw's forceful application of the celebrated British civil suit, Somerset v. Stewart (1772), in the landmark case of the slave girl Med, or Commonwealth v. Aves (1836). It explores material that has been largely left out of the antislavery story: the cases brought by abolitionists to free slaves who had traveled with their masters into free territory. Wong's essay reconstructs the records of these cases from popular literature, newsprint, and legal pamphlets to explore what recent literary and historical scholarship has largely overlooked. Harriet and John S. Jacobs, Maria Weston Chapman, Sojourner Truth, and Ellis Gray Loring appear alongside a number of largely unknown slave attendants in an essay that explores the complex ways legal discourses circulating in newsprint constituted the agency and subjectivity of slaves who petitioned Northern cour! ts for freedom (in counterdistinction from the criminal will of the fugitive). Their cases reveal the contradictory logic by which abolitionists disregarded the slaves' express desires to remain with their masters, and in many cases argued for the very sorts of separations from kin that usually figured so largely in abolitionist attacks on slavery. These legal stories compose a loose genre of antislavery literature, charting the struggles of jurists, slaveholders, free blacks, and abolitionists as they negotiated the predicament of a territorially bounded freedom.
• Salvaging Legal Personhood: Melville's Benito Cereno
  - Am Lit 81(1):35-64 (2009)
  DeLombard's essay departs from previous legally oriented readings of Benito Cereno by foregrounding not the title character's mysterious deposition but the novella's hitherto neglected series of contracts in order to interpret Herman Melville's only sustained literary portrayal of slavery through contemporaneous changes in contract law. Surveying the numerous legal documents that accumulate within and between the novella and its source text, Amasa Delano's Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres (1817), the essay compares contracts and testimony to demonstrate how, instead of corroborating the legal personhood of their agents, these amassed textual assertions of civil agency cumulatively deauthorize text and author alike. The insistent temporality of law (and with it, narrative) ensures that, rather than affirming autonomous selfhood, such legal and extralegal acts of testifying and contract making document its absence.
• Interracial Sexual Abuse and Legal Subjectivity in Antebellum Law and Literature
  - Am Lit 81(1):65-92 (2009)
  Representations of the sexual abuse of enslaved women merit a specificity of analysis that has so far eluded scholars of American literature and culture. The definition of legal character in this context calls for further study. Stone addresses the peculiar legal conundrum in which enslaved women found themselves when suffering the abuse of slaveholders. These women's shifting legal subject-positions posed theoretical problems within this particular power relationship, as the boundary distinguishing the law's treatment of slaves as property and persons blurred. An enslaved woman's admittedly slender potential civil protection as property was eroded when her abuser was simultaneously her owner. This shift in her protections produced a rift in her legal subjectivity through which systems of terror could operate legitimately. Stone closely examines Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1865) in conjunction with the 1855 trial of Celia, an executed murder! ous slave, to compare specific literary and legal interpretations of North Carolina and Missouri slave law against a more general understanding of slaves' legal "double character" to argue that both women, through criminal acts, negotiated legal and literary conventions in their pursuit of legal subjectivity. Comparing a legal case and a literary text extends scholarship on literary treatments of antebellum crime to determine how both women challenged early American legal and cultural understandings of black criminality.
• Fugitive Obscura: Runaway Slave Portraiture and Early Photographic Technology
  - Am Lit 81(1):93-125 (2009)
  This essay expands the vital but limited critical focus on the importance (practical and thematic) of textual literacy in slave narratives and other writings that appeared in the African American press in order to apprehend more clearly how these writers, working with words during a profoundly visual cultural moment, argued for a visual literacy that both denied the indexical power of white visual practices and embraced the power of the image to make injustice visible. Blackwood's analysis focuses on how texts by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs explore the representational capacity of a variety of prephotographic visual technologies, including portraiture, woodcuts, stereotypes, and the camera obscura. Douglass and Jacobs lived in the midst of a photographic revolution. Douglass repeatedly commented on photographic technology and celebrated its democratic potential. But both writers also devoted sustained attention in their texts to pre- or nonphotographic forms ! of visual representation. In so doing, they articulate a major, yet understudied, argument about the intersections between visual and textual representation during the period. In letters, editorials, and slave narratives, Douglass and Jacobs dramatize the interplay between the objective and illusionist potential of visual technologies. By embracing and remaining skeptical of the truthful qualities of the photographic image, the fugitive notice, and the slave narrative itself, Douglass and Jacobs enact a complicated form of resistance that alters our understandings of antebellum African American aesthetic production and the history of nineteenth-century visual culture more generally.
• Free Soil and the Abolitionist Forests of Frederick Douglass's "The Heroic Slave"
  - Am Lit 81(1):127-152 (2009)
  In the 1850s, Frederick Douglass set out to nurture emergent antislavery commitments within the most advanced political milieu of the antebellum decade, the Free Soil movement. Douglass developed a protoenvironmentalist critique of capitalism's alienation of workers from the land, arguing that liberty achieved its truest expression when free people mixed their labor with nature in the pursuit of self-reliance. Democratic access to arable land was a precondition of real emancipation, which required reversing capitalism's expropriation of the commons. Douglass fictionalized these ideas in his only novella, "The Heroic Slave" (1853), in which Madison Washington, leader of the 1841 Creole mutiny, declares his independence in a forest glade that functions as a chapel of natural rights. This kind of radical republican pastoralism also shapes My Bondage, My Freedom (1855). The trope's polemical function is especially apparent when it is contrasted retrospectively with The Nar! rative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), in which nature is a paralyzing wilderness rather than a theater of self-emancipation. Ecocriticism has failed so far to engage substantially with black cultures of nature. Part of the problem may be that the lithified historical experience of slavery in rural settings has prevented black writers from developing ecocentric ways of thinking. Douglass's integration of radical pastoralism into abolitionist rhetoric is not only a spotlight example of an alternative black tradition and experience of nature, it also showcases the organic connection between the struggles for social and environmental justice.
• "Be Cautious of the Word `Rebel'": Race, Revolution, and Transnational History in Martin Delany's Blake; or, The Huts of America
  - Am Lit 81(1):153-179 (2009)
  Doolen examines the interrelationship between transnationalist ideology and the African American experience in Martin Delany's novel Blake; or, The Huts of America. In the antebellum struggle against slavery and racism, abolitionists considered fiction less effective than more factual narrative forms. However, Doolen argues that Martin Delany uses the novel form to identify how the fictions of white supremacy established the terms and categories of U.S. historiography. Recognizing that white-authored histories helped maintain the institutions of slavery, Delany attempts to remove African Americans from a nationalist discourse that automatically referred their appeals for racial justice back to a failed white revolutionary project. Doolen argues that the transnational shift that structures Blake--a movement between the United States and Cuba--constituted Delany's rejection of American Revolutionary time and space. By the time of the novel's abrupt ending, Delany had dev! eloped a hemispheric context for black liberation that cannot be traced back to the eighteenth-century corruptions of American republicanism. Finally, Doolen makes a case for Blake's literary complexity by emphasizing the nuanced relationship between novelistic and historical writing. In the process, Doolen challenges the standard chronology of African American literary history in which abolitionism's political, rhetorical, and formulaic constraints supposedly hindered the development of a fictional tradition prior to Emancipation.