Legal Fictions: Constituting Race, Composing Literature [Paperback]

InLegal 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'sBelovedand Charles Johnson'sMiddle Passageas stories about personhood and property, David Bradley'sThe Chaneysville Incidentand Ralph Ellison'sInvisible Manas structured by evidence law, and Nella Larsen'sPassingas 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 Fictionsis a bold declaration that the black body is thoroughly bound by law and an unflinching look at the implications of that claim.

Legal Fictionsis a bold declaration that, in the U.S., the black body is thoroughly bound by law. It is an unflinchingly look at the implications of that claim and a virtuoso survey of the ways that black authors of literary fiction have engaged with the law's constructions of race since the era of slavery.