Research

My recently completed book manuscript, Black Pro Se: Authorship and the Limits of Law in 19th-Century African American Literature, contends that legal form was a feature of African American writing in the first half of the 19th century, that lawyerly imagination is a definitional element in the evolution of the African American literary tradition. Organized around four specific legal forms—appeal, jurisdiction, confession, and precedent—Black Pro Se records the way writers use these legal forms to re-script existing logics of power. The book reads Black literature alongside intertexts from U.S. legal history, including statutes, judicial opinions, and trial transcripts, arguing that Black visions for belonging radically re-organized the juridical structure of the nation-state in general and the U.S. nation-state in particular. As frequently, these visions dispensed with the nation-state altogether, imagining forms of sovereignty that were not place-bound at all. Black Pro Se contextualizes the use of legal form as a technology of visionary worldmaking. For inquiries about Black Pro Se, please email me at fbarter@uoregon.edu.