"Black Legal Worldmaking in the 19th Century" by Faith Barter
Black Legal Worldmaking in the 19th Century: Harriet Jacobs and Jurisdictional Imagination
Join the Department of English for a talk by Faith Barter,听Associate Professor of English at the University of Oregon.
September 26, 2-4 pm
McCall MacBain Arts Building, Rm 160
涩里番
853 rue Sherbrooke West
All are welcome. Snacks and refreshments will be served.
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More about听Barter's latest book,听Black Pro Se: Authorship and the Limits of Law in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature听:
Black thinkers in the antebellum United States grappled with what it meant to inhabit a place, a history, and a violent legal regime. In newspapers and pamphlets, political speeches, and fiction, Black writers persistently imagined alternative and liberatory legal futures. In reading these writers as architects of legal possibility, Faith Barter mobilizes the coincidental intimacy of prose and the legal term pro se, which refers to litigants who represent themselves in court. The book studies multiple literary genres鈥攕hort stories, novels, freedom narratives, speeches, confessions, periodicals, and pamphlets鈥攁longside legal historical treatises, trial transcripts, judicial opinions, and statutes.
In Black Pro Se, Barter juxtaposes nineteenth-century law and literature to show how Black writers counterintuitively used legal forms to reimagine their own relationships to time and place. Organized around four legal forms鈥攁ppeal, confession, jurisdiction, and precedent鈥攖his book demonstrates how Black writers creatively used them to challenge the logics of their oppression. Reading Black writers not merely as witnesses or victims but as worldmaking visionaries, this book excavates the importance of legal thinking in the African American literary tradition and its reverberations through Black feminist theory and Afrofuturism.
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Faith Barter is Associate Professor of English and affiliated faculty in Black Studies at the University of Oregon, where she teaches courses on Black literary and legal cultures from the 19th century to the present. Her writing on Black legal imagination, Black privacy, contemporary film, and Black feminist thought has appeared or is forthcoming in MELUS, African American Review, Meridians, Law, Culture & Humanities, and the European Journal of English Studies, as well as in several edited collections and encyclopedias. A former lawyer, she is also a past participant at Penn State University's First Book Institute and the Law and Humanities Junior Scholars Workshop.