About

Jeannine Marie DeLombard is a professor in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with an affiliation to the Department of History. She specializes in African American and pre-1900 American literature, focusing on the intersections of slavery, law, and culture. Her scholarly work includes the publication of books such as 'In the Shadow of the Gallows: Race, Crime, and American Civic Identity' (2012) and 'Slavery on Trial: Law, Abolitionism, and Print Culture' (2007). DeLombard is engaged in completing two book projects titled 'Bound to Respect: Democratic Dignity & the Indignities of Slavery' and 'The Skin Aristocracy in America.' Her research has been recognized with awards including the Penny Pether Award for Law & Language Scholarship, the Robert K. Martin Best Book Prize, and the Melville Society’s Hennig Cohen Prize for Best Work in Melville Studies. Her work on Frederick Douglass is featured in Norton Critical Editions and forthcoming publications, and she has contributed essays to various scholarly collections on topics related to law, literature, and African American history.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• History
• Law
• Archaeology
• Anthropology
• Art
• Criminology
• Literature

Selected publications

• Police

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2025-01-07

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This entry surveys the legal and literary challenges to the racist exercise of the police power mounted by nineteenth-century African Americans in the first civil rights movement. Radiating out from the enslaving, patriarchal household, this police power manifested itself in slave patrols, fugitive slave laws, segregation, vagrancy laws, and other restrictions on Black mobility. Private individuals and entities who joined law-enforcement officers in exercising the police power relied on ‘racializing surveillance’ to supervise and restrict the movements of all Black people, regardless of condition. African-American authors and litigants such as James Forten, David Walker, Benjamin Franklin Roberts, Harriet and Dred Scott, Harriet Jacobs, and Lucy Delaney exposed and contested racist policing in order to assert the autonomy and integrity of their households. Greater knowledge of the police power exercised by Black householders and law-enforcement officers alike would productively complicate our understanding of nineteenth-century African Americans’ relationship to police.

  PublisherDOI

• <scp>Sarah Danielle Allison</scp> . <i>The Rise of Celebrity Authorship: Nineteenth-Century Print Culture and Antislavery</i>

  The Review of English Studies · 2025-12-17

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Law, Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies, and the Black Formalist Tradition

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2025-01-02

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Art of Naturalization

  NOVEL A Forum on Fiction · 2025-08-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Stephanie DeGooyer revises the early history of the English novel by contextualizing it in the legal and political history of immigration and naturalization. Rather than charting the rise of the self-possessed, individual, Protestant, and—above all—English subject, DeGooyer contends, novels by Daniel Defoe, Tobias Smollett, Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Mary Shelley experiment with a “paranational” subject (20). In contrast to international or transnational approaches premised on established (and policed) national borders and identity, “paranationality . . . signals both the internal and external movements of individuals at a time of porous territorial borders and in an age when religious affiliations were often more important than national ones, and when the modern conception of state borders as ‘closable’ was nonexistent” (20). This paranationality, DeGooyer maintains, is difficult to perceive from a post-nineteenth-century vantage that understands national belonging in affective, identitarian terms. In the earlier period, DeGooyer argues, English law and the novel found in the unapologetically artificial process of naturalization a generative means for exploring the changing terms of subjectivity and civic belonging.Over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, DeGooyer reveals, debates over the naturalization of foreigners articulated changing ideas about the grounds of subjecthood, from a perpetual, natural allegiance to the monarch to a voluntary status achieved through formal legal process. Before Borders begins with Calvin's Case (1608) and its successors. The accession of King James VI of Scotland as ruler of England and Ireland raised the question of whether or not a subject born in Scotland after the Union of the Crowns could inherit land in England. The case necessarily addressed the foundations of subjecthood, because the ability to own landed property (and thus to sue in court and to hold office) had, since the medieval period, distinguished English subjects from aliens. Subsequent cases brought by postnati Scots (born after the Union of the Crowns), as well as a series of proposed naturalization bills, made it possible to understand the status of English subject no longer tacitly, as an implicit, enduring, natural allegiance to the sovereign, but explicitly, as a verbal civil procedure authorized by Parliament to promote individual and national economic and/or religious interests. Through this “naturalization imaginary” (35), DeGooyer contends, law, like the emergent genre of the novel, used language to create new subjects and new forms of inclusion.In readings of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1710), Smollett's Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753), Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison (1753), Sterne's Sentimental Journey (1759), Burney's The Wanderer (1817), Edgeworth's Harrington (1817), and Shelley's Frankenstein (1818/1831), DeGooyer persuasively establishes the “paranational” positioning of these novels’ plots and characters, often by focusing on narrative beginnings, endings, and frames. For example, chapter 3 explicitly disregards Robinson Crusoe's celebrated island sojourn. Instead, DeGooyer emphasizes the novel's opening paragraph, in which Crusoe recounts his German paternity, English birth, and Anglicized name. Defoe, an advocate for liberalized naturalization policies, dates Crusoe's birth in York to 1632, a period when his father's alien status would have prevented the native Englishman from inheriting real estate. In DeGooyer's deft reading, this framing heightens the relevance of Crusoe's brief accounts of his wealth accumulation as a naturalized Brazilian plantation owner, enslaver, and converted Catholic. Defoe's novel quietly illustrates how England's restrictive naturalization policies might enable an imperial rival like Portugal and, by extension, its “Catholick” converts and subjects to benefit from the globe-trotting English-born and German-descended adventurer's extraction of enormous wealth from colonial enslaved labor (qtd. in DeGooyer 95).DeGooyer does not, however, rely on the itinerant Crusoe to make her point. Chapter 4, “Open-Door Domestic Fiction,” analyzes the last novels of Richardson, Sterne, and Burney to illuminate how the final works published by these domestic novelists explore the development of individuality and family life in paranational settings. Both travel and marriage, DeGooyer points out, require individual subjects to negotiate legal processes. In the early nineteenth century, chapter 5 demonstrates, Edgeworth and Shelley engaged in a “narrative naturalization” (146) that strove “to use the genre of prose fiction itself to redress failures of legal naturalization to represent and incorporate religious and racial outsiders” (146), from Harrington's fictional Jewess to Frankenstein's monster. Throughout, DeGooyer insists that adopting a more historically accurate early modern understanding of naturalization necessitates a reconsideration of established scholarship on the rise of the novel (Ian Watt, Michael McKeon, Nancy Armstrong) as well as postcolonial reassessments (Edward Said, Srinivas Aravmudan). Both approaches, DeGooyer points out, presume an unambiguously English individual subject.As a nineteenth-century Americanist and African Americanist who specializes in prose nonfiction, I am not well positioned to assess DeGooyer's revisionist challenge to the history of the eighteenth-century British novel. (The book's strengths—its eloquence, brevity, concision, and clarity—are enabled, in part, by its economical treatment of the often lengthy novels under consideration.) Yet, as ambitious as Before Borders’ literary historical intervention is, I found myself wishing that this brilliant, persuasive study mounted an equally forthright challenge to legal cultural studies. As DeGooyer powerfully demonstrates, naturalization offers an excellent vantage from which to consider subject formation in law and literature.Before Borders reads canonical fiction alongside debates over seventeenth-century litigation involving ante- and postnati Scots; a proposed “universal naturalization” bill (1664); the Aliens Act (1698); the Foreign Protestants Naturalization Act (1709); the Jewish Naturalization Act (1753); and (a second) Aliens Act (1793). This interdisciplinary methodology enables DeGooyer to chart the early modern shift from a natural model of subjecthood that defined one's status within a hierarchical system of obligations culminating in allegiance to the monarch, to an individualist, contractualist understanding of subjecthood (and, by extension, citizenship) as the artificial product of legal process. A more thoroughly historicized account of subject formation, however, might view English jurists’ and novelists’ increasingly formalist, procedural approach not as a novelty but as a reversion to a classical view of the subject as an artifact of legal and cultural technique.This issue asserts itself most urgently in DeGooyer's discussion of the early modern origins of the noun naturalization. Noting culture critics’ penchant for the term, DeGooyer finds that for Raymond Williams, Frederic Jameson, and their successors the word evokes “the self-evident process by which humans make nature” (62). Rather than “the supernatural process of making nature,” she maintains, critical references to naturalization denote “the human practice of faking it” (62). But “in the eighteenth century,” DeGooyer notes, “the dominant meaning of naturalization was that of a legal fiction that finagled an equivalence between a foreigner and natural-born subject in civic law” (63). In contrast to the current view of “naturalization [as] a form that mimics biological (and therefore natural) modes of reproduction,” DeGooyer maintains, “naturalization, in early modernity, was an overtly fictional process invented by law” (63). Unlike today's critics, DeGooyer suggests, early modern “writers did not fear naturalization as a projection of biology but rather the opposite: they feared naturalization as a nonbiological process” (63).The legal and cultural history of subject formation in the West suggests, however, that this may be a distinction without a difference. Naturalization is a nonbiological, overtly fictional process whose purpose and effect are to mimic biological, natural modes of reproduction through the projection of nativity. As DeGooyer puts it: “[F]oreigners were transformed or ‘reborn’ as natural subjects through the artificial pathways of law . . . not to assimilate them to the national community but to make them correspond to natural-born subjects for the sake of the internationalization of property” (60). This artificial legal technique recalls the imperial procedure of restitutio natalium, restoration of free birth, through which a Roman freedman could acquire the status of a freeborn person—which similarly facilitated citizenship and control of property.Indeed, the emergent early modern view of subject formation elucidated by DeGooyer is revolutionary in Hannah Arendt's astronomical sense: “[R]evolving back to some pre-established point and, by implication, of swinging back into some preordained order” (Arendt 33). Before Borders swings back to an earlier legal and cultural order when it invokes the Roman antecedents for naturalization as a kind of legal fiction. What early modern “lawyers and judges meant by fiction,” DeGooyer explains, “was a necessary and obvious legal construction to achieve an intended result (indeed, the word fiction is derived from the word fingere, meaning ‘form’ or ‘construction’)” (50–51). DeGooyer notes that “in ancient Roman law, this kind of fiction is evident in the extension of citizenship to a person who either lost it or did not have it before” (51). Thus, she concludes of early modern England: To become a rights-bearing person in the eyes of the law, foreigners had to assume an obviously artificial persona in law. In effect, through naturalization the natural, flesh-and-blood individual was replaced with a legal persona, or “persona ficta.” In Latin, persona originally referred to a theatrical mask, and this sense survives in the idea of a legal persona, an artificially designed identity meant to obscure personal and material facts of life. Naturalization not only covered a person's interior with an exterior mask, it also replaced or overlooked that person's history. (9)Drawing on Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito, DeGooyer offers an account of the person that owes more to medieval Christian, post-Romantic, and post-1945 understandings of law's person as metaphysicalized and biologized subject than to the persona of classical and early modern law and culture. In this presentist version of persona's well-known origin story, the ancient theatrical mask serves to cover and obscure the authentic interior self (which silently and redundantly becomes “a person” with “personal . . . facts of life” that constitute “that person's history”). Rather than distinguishing the persona—the mask, character, or role—from the actor who assumes that particular part in theatrical or legal proceedings, DeGooyer opposes the (real) “person,” “the natural, flesh-and-blood individual,” to its artificial counterpart, “the persona ficta”—the same term used to refer to the corporate person. But as scholarship by theater historian David Wiles, Romanist Yan Thomas, and legal philosopher René Brouwer (among others) suggests, the Roman legal persona derives from the Greek theatrical mask, whose purpose was to display a character constituted by exterior, artificial attributes, which could be performed by any number of masked human actors. Much as Soviet folklorist Vladimir Propp argues of characters in prose narrative, the persona serves a structural function in (literary or legal) proceedings.Our estrangement from this ancient, formalist view of the person derives from the metaphysicalization, anthropologization, and individualization of persona under patristic and medieval Christianity. According to Thomas, the thirteenth-century Pope Innocent IV transformed Roman law's persona from a technical legal “function”—“fungor (‘to act as’)”—into a “fiction” of representation: “fingor (‘to act as if’)” (130). The papal designation of corporate entities as “‘fictitious persons’ (personae fictae)” (89) facilitated the invention of their counterpart: the natural (or “physical”) person as human being conjured by Roman canon law and invoked in Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651) and William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–69).As DeGooyer's account of naturalization discourse suggests, however, the revived interest in the person as an artifact of legal and cultural technology challenged this dichotomy. In a frequently quoted passage from “Of the Rights of Persons,” Blackstone asserts “PERSONS . . . are divided by the law into either natural persons, or artificial,” explaining that “natural persons are such as the God of nature formed us: artificial are such as created and devised by human laws for the purposes of society and government; which are called corporations or bodies politic” (Blackstone 110). But later in the same volume, he refers in passing to the nobleman as “a person created by writ” (389). Blackstone's phrasing makes it clear that this conferral of status “created” a particular class of person. The God of nature may have formed the human beings who assumed the various characters whom he designates “natural persons,” but legal devices such as writs and patents created these and “artificial persons” alike. Then, as now, the verb naturalize nicely encapsulates what Thomas has shown to be the characteristically legal process of making the natural.All of this may well be beyond the scope of a first book, especially one as tightly constructed and cogently argued as this one is. But the belated resurgence of interest among early modern English jurists and novelists in a formalist, technical understanding of law's subjects—and not just in reference to subjects and foreigners—is an important part of the story Before Borders seeks to tell. Civilian jurists had, since the late sixteenth century, increasingly sought to distinguish law's persona from homo (“the natural, flesh-and-blood individual”). In seventeenth-century English naturalization debates, this endeavor manifests itself in what DeGooyer dismisses as “clunky metaphors involving clothing” (53). But “analogies of . . . clothing (naturalization as . . . a ‘cloathe’ cloaking an alien birth)” (51) are consistent with the formalist view of persona as mask or character. References to clothing one class of person (foreigner) with a different status (naturalized subject) acknowledge how individual human actors become literally invested with the rights and duties that constitute that new persona.Like clothing, theatrical masks or legal personae are donned and doffed by individual human actors as they assume and discard various characters or roles. The pernicious alternative was for law's persons, with their constitutive rights and duties, to correlate to purportedly “natural” human attributes, from age and sex to race (either in the sense of noble lineage or phenotype). Indeed, the law of persons that the English had inherited from the Romans often took the form of hierarchical status dyads, many of which appeared to refer not simply to well-known legal characters but also to the embodied human actors who assumed those roles: husband and wife, parent and child, master and servant, noble and commoner, native-born subject and alien, and so forth.This broader law of persons becomes significant when we consider other early modern restrictions on movement that persist today. While Before Borders’ title points to an era when “foreigners were free to enter [England] at any time” in the absence of any “military guard or standing army to thwart entry or escort removal,” it also obscures the fact that, as DeGooyer acknowledges, “there were other, less direct ways of policing migration in the form of the Poor Laws, penal transportation, and vagrancy laws” (7). In England, as in British North America, these early modern legal devices relied on the law of persons. As legal historian Marcus Dubber has shown, the police power is a discretionary authority that preemptively and often coercively governs social subordinates on the basis of status (“vagrant”) rather than retrospectively adjudicating their conduct through the formal legal proceedings more typically available to citizen-subjects. Radiating out from the patriarchal household, the police power drew on the distinction between the sui juris, or independent, household master and his alieni juris domestic subordinates, such as wife, child, servant, or slave—each of which is a class of person.From legal historian Kunal Parker to literary critic Sal Nicolazzo, scholars have shown how the policing of persons served to restrict the movements of status subordinates within early modern England and its American colonies. Not surprisingly, then, those who sought to change their condition often combined what DeGooyer would call paranational movement with a sort of status transvestism. The examples that come most readily to mind are the masquerades of fugitives from slavery like Frederick Douglass and Ellen Craft, who, respectively, donned the costumes of an American sailor and disabled white Southerner, so as to perform the role of free person in the North. As historians Laura Edwards, Jonathan Prude, and David Waldstreicher have documented, these activist nineteenth-century authors had their early modern predecessors in the servants and enslaved people who escaped in the costumes of their status superiors in an attempt to assume new legal characters.DeGooyer correctly presents early modern legal and literary engagements with naturalization as an important chapter in the history of subject formation. But this study has more far-reaching implications for legal humanities scholarship than merely revising the cultural history of immigration, citizenship, and national identity. It also offers a thoroughgoing account of English jurists’ and novelists’ to a formalist view of law's persons over the eighteenth own to human actors with the legal personae they assume to the by the early century, of what might be called a view of the person. But DeGooyer's excellent study how naturalization discourse in early modern English law and to the of this formalist, understanding of law's person as from the embodied human

  PublisherDOI

• Before Equiano: A Prehistory of the North American Slave Narrative by Zachary McLeod Hutchins (review)

  Early American literature · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • History
  • Art

  Reviewed by: Before Equiano: A Prehistory of the North American Slave Narrative by Zachary McLeod Hutchins Jeannine Marie Delombard (bio) Before Equiano: A Prehistory of the North American Slave Narrative zachary mcleod hutchins University of North Carolina Press, 2022 306 pp. Before Equiano's subtitle suggests that this new monograph offers a study of the texts and circumstances that yielded the genre known as the slave narrative, one of whose conventional starting points is The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gusatvus Vassa, the African (1789). It quickly becomes apparent, however, that Before Equiano is more revisionist history than "prehistory." In the introduction, Hutchins asserts that "because eighteenth-century newspapers were the source of the period's most numerous and popular materials on slavery and because their language and ideas shaped the first book-length, stand-alone auto/biographies of enslaved Africans, they should be read as slave narratives" (21). The claim is not simply that representations of slavery in the early American periodical press "shaped" the emergent genre but that "eighteenth-century newspapers" themselves "should be read as slave narratives" (21). As it turns out, the methodological intervention centers not on the newspapers so much as [End Page 158] how we read them. Calling on today's literary critics to adopt the "imaginative" reading that he attributes to eighteenth-century newspaper audiences, Hutchins proposes to redefine the slave narrative itself (7). From Dorothy Porter and Marian Wilson Starling in the 1930s and 1940s, to Frances Smith Foster, John Blassingame, and William Andrews in the 1970s and 1980s, scholars of the slave narrative traced the genre's origins to ephemeral and often firsthand accounts of the lives of enslaved individuals in colonial newspapers, letters, broadsides, and pamphlets. Hutchins, by contrast, is interested in a much broader aggregate of "materials on slavery" (21)—advertisements for fugitives from slavery and accounts of trials or insurrections involving enslaved people, but also, crucially, foreign dispatches treating enslavement as a common wartime practice. Hutchins locates the beginnings of the genre in the minds of "imaginative readers" who "might be said to have mentally authored the first slave narratives as they consumed brief newspaper reports of enslaved individuals" (7). In this way, he maintains, "slave narratives were read by both black and white readers, long before they were bound and sold—even before they were written" (7). Moreover, because bondage was "a condition rhetorically and philosophically associated with war," he contends, these "stories of slavery were always embedded in a global political context" (21). As discussed below, Hutchins most powerfully illustrates the latter claim in chapters 3 and 4. Along the way, however, "the slave narrative" ceases to denote an account of the experience of enslavement and instead refers to any one of a number of "stories of slavery" (21). Indeed, Before Equiano concludes by suggesting that, because John "Dickinson conceives of himself and his fellow colonists as slaves pressed into bondage by British duties" in the series of essays he originally published in the Pennsylvania Chronicle (1767–68), his Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania "might be described as one of the first North American slave narratives" (182). In this telling, it is Dickinson's belated white interlocutor, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur who, in Letters from an American Farmer (1782), anticipates the nineteenth-century development of the genre with, as Hutchins puts it, "his advocacy for racializing the slave narrative" (188). Crèvecoeur's portrayals of enslaved people in Letters, Hutchins suggests, offered a reality check to the American colonists' rhetorical self-fashioning as the "slaves" of their British masters. The most devastating such portrayal (which Hutchins quotes at length) appears in letter 9, when Crèvecoeur's [End Page 159] narrator, James, finds a Black man suspended in a cage, deprived of food and water, and slowly becoming carrion for insects and birds of prey. But the gothic scene also illuminates, contra Hutchins, the importance of distinguishing the slave narrative from other "stories of slavery." The grotesquely mutilated body of Crèvecoeur's caged slave offers a "shocking spectacle," even as it attests to the voyeurism of the white author, his narrator, and his presumed readership (J. Hector St. John de...

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• Erin Forbes, Criminal Genius in African American and US Literature, 1793-1845

  Transatlantica · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Darnella Frazier received the 2021 Pulitzer Prize Citation and Award for “courageously recording the murder of George Floyd, a video that spurred protests against police brutality around the world, highlighting the crucial role of citizens in journalists’ quest for truth and justice.” With this short statement, the Pulitzer Board recognized the “active, material, and distributed” (153) but also “voluntarist” (18) agency that Erin Forbes identifies as “criminal genius” in her new book of that...

  PublisherDOI

• Character and Conduct

  American Literary History · 2023-11-15

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The Robinsons’ lawsuit raised the question of just who embodied servitude in the post-Reconstruction US: the formerly enslaved, African-descended passenger or the normatively white railroad conductor?

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• <i>The Dreadful Word: Speech Crime and Polite Gentlemen in Massachusetts, 1690–1776</i> by Kristin A. Olbertson

  The New England Quarterly · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Law

  Hate speech. Cancel culture. Civility. Safe spaces. Trigger warnings. Microaggressions. Pronouns. Gag orders. Doxxing. Parental controls. Twitter and Facebook suspensions. Misinformation. Disinformation. Fake news. Alternative facts. The dark web. TikTok bans. Hot mics. Discord leaks. Oversharing. Earmuffs.American law and culture is preoccupied with speech, its effects, and its limits. As historian Kristin Olbertson documents in her delightfully readable new book, this preoccupation long predates the First Amendment—at least for one segment of the population. The Dreadful Word: Speech Crime and Polite Gentlemen in Massachusetts, 1690–1776 argues that white, male colonial elites asserted and maintained their power and authority by policing the speech of their lower-status counterparts. They also sought to control the speech of women and Black people, and they were torn between viewing Indigenous speech as noble or as just plain savage. But it was the noise, threats, cursing, contempt, perjury, false reports, and defamation of white, plebeian men that consistently prompted criminal prosecutions in Massachusetts. By criminalizing that speech, Olbertson contends, colonial gentlemen sought to establish themselves as part of “the new polite-ocracy” of the broader transatlantic British empire (54).The newness of this genteel social order lay in its redefinition of the nature of transgressive speech. Olbertson maintains that early modern and Puritan “concerns about speech as sin were joined by, and often superseded by, concerns about speech as fundamentally impolite” (20). If sinful speech threatened hierarchies of both gender and religion (think Anne Hutchinson), then impolite speech illuminated socio-economic stratification among colonial Englishmen. Olbertson finds that most speech crime prosecutions involved violations regarding rules of deference by the lower and middling sorts toward their social “betters,” as well as occasional breaches of courtesy among elites. Seldom were members of the lower orders held accountable for transgressive speech among themselves. Whereas historians such as Cornelia Dayton and Terri L. Snyder have demonstrated the important legal and cultural role of colonial women's speech, Olbertson suggests that decreasing prosecutorial scrutiny of their illicit speech reflects the declining discursive relevance of women in the new, genteel order. Gentlemen defined themselves and consolidated power against women and lower-status men by associating polite, civil speech with the ability to govern themselves and their households. As colonial elites became less worried about the ability of vocal utterances to cause actual harm to individuals through curses, witchcraft, threats, or verbal abuse, they increasingly emphasized the potential for speech to challenge civil authority and disrupt the peace, whether by spreading false reports, defaming prominent men, displaying contempt for legal officials and processes, or simply by making undue noise, profanely swearing, or lying. None of these utterances were unique to men of the lower orders. The difference was that their work, socializing, and family life tended to occur in quasi-public spaces where they were subject to more scrutiny, and therefore censure, by higher-ups. Like the coercive physical violence that some householders routinely exercised against their wives, children, servants, and enslaved people, the speech of elite men was shielded from criminalization by its privacy. When elite men did want to make their potentially defamatory speech public, Olbertson astutely observes, they could dress it up as satire to avoid prosecution.Olbertson's carefully researched study advances scholarship in several areas of legal humanities inquiry. Her analysis of transgressive speech as one pretext for “policing the low” (56) deepens our understanding of the broader exercise of the police power, as theorized by Markus Dubber. In early American contexts, this preservation of the king's, the people's, or the public peace has been analyzed by William Novak, Christopher Tomlins, Laura Edwards, Bryan Wagner, Sal Nicolazzo, and Kate Masur. Olbertson's attention to ritualized ceremonies of deference and legal-cultural anxieties about the artificiality, dishonesty, and dissemblance requisite to displays of politeness invites a consideration of early American law as performance, in conversation with Julie Stone Peters' work on legal theatricality in Europe.Much as the Puritan construction of speech-as-sin gave way to the cosmopolitan, imperial understanding of speech-as-impoliteness, the American Revolution prompted a re-evaluation of illicit speech—this time as disloyalty. Political and popular censure of disloyal speech had the leveling effect of authorizing and empowering lower-status men to speak out against royal officials and other hitherto powerful polite gentlemen. In the nineteenth century, the elite culture of sensibility, civility, and credibility was gradually succeeded by a middle-class culture of respectability that tended to be enforced through norms rather than law. Thus, even as more and more Americans could retreat to private spaces of their own, Olbertson suggests, they found “no similar shelter from the supervisory gaze of the market” in an industrial capitalist culture where success often “meant . . . offering oneself up for economic valuation and sale of sorts, and [where] managing one's speech appropriately was simply another means of product promotion” (285). The world of likes, influencers, and virtue signaling would not be far behind.

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• Law

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2021-06-16

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  In 1851, Frederick Douglass publicly challenged the position of William Lloyd Garrison and the American Anti-Slavery Society that the U.S. Constitution was a proslavery document. As an enslaved child, the self-taught Douglass had identified literacy as “the pathway from slavery to freedom.” The same insight prompted the mature author and editor to part ways with Garrisonian moral suasionists in order to join “legal suasionists” like antislavery constitutionalist lawyers Lysander Spooner and William Goodell. From the 1840s through the 1890s, Douglass promoted the legal literacy of everyday African Americans (free and enslaved) while developing his own legal-critical analysis of American racism. Committed to wielding the “forms of law and . . . rules of hermeneutics” on behalf of freedom and equality, Douglass tirelessly challenged the increasingly biopolitical orientation of post-Reconstruction legislation and jurisprudence. From slavery to mass incarceration, Douglass insisted, racism is incompatible with the rule of law.

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• Abolition’s Afterlives

  American Literary History · 2021 · 2 citations

  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  Abstract The positioning of movements for social and political change as forms of postemancipation abolition democracy has a long history. Abolition has been the watchword under which initiatives proceed to eradicate the death penalty, human trafficking, nuclear weapons, the hegemony of Wall Street, prisons, police, the deportation of immigrants, and more. The essays in this forum examine nineteenth-century abolitionism’s complicated legacy through the prism of contemporary frameworks and agitations for justice and social transformation. The working papers reflect vital ongoing debates about abolition’s afterlives while meditating upon a series of pressing current concerns: migrant justice, the humanitarian rhetoric of some anti-racist initiatives, the activism of Erica Garner following the murder by police of her father, the racialization of madness and violence, the prison-abolition movement, and climate activism. By addressing the mobilization of rhetorics of slavery and abolition in our own vexed political moment, the contributors reveal that to think abolition now is necessarily to rethink abolition then.

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Frequent coauthors

• Robert S. Levine

  Florida Atlantic University

  4 shared

• Chris Raczkowski

  3 shared

• Hester Blum

  Pennsylvania State University

  2 shared

• Jodi Schorb

  2 shared

• Elisa Tamarkin

  1 shared

• Pamela Bedore

  1 shared

• Julie Winch

  University of Massachusetts Boston

  1 shared

• Elizabeth Renker

  The Ohio State University

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Penny Pether Award for Law & Language Scholarship (2019)
• Robert K. Martin Best Book Prize (2013)
• Melville Society’s Hennig Cohen Prize for Best Work in Melvi…
• Lifetime membership in the American Antiquarian Society (200…