African American literature and the law

• Date: 29 February 2008
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S1059-4337(07)00607-2
• Published date: 29 February 2008
• Pages: 153-172
• Author: Jon-Christian Suggs

AFRICAN AMERICAN

LITERATURE AND THE LAW

Jon-Christian Suggs

ABSTRACT

Reading African American literature through the lens of American legal

history broadly construed and reading American legal history through the

lens of African American literature reshapes both texts of American

experience and provides new readings of the literature and new

perspectives on the law. Consequences for the understanding of each

socially constructed ‘‘text’’ of reality proceed from examining their

common narratival practices, specifically calling for a new periodization

and taxonomy of African American literature and for a new ‘‘romantic’’

history of American law.

The writer of this chapter begins from the assumption that the reader, having

opened this volume, has some sense of the fundamental positions that can be

taken in a consideration of the relationships between literature and the law:

literature in law; law in literature; law as literature.

1

Case has been put for

and against the efficacies of each of these as an enterprise and most of those

arguments will be examined, surely, in the essays which accompany this one.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine an additional or alternative

relationship between one particular body of literature, African American

literature as represented by fiction in a specific period, and ‘‘law’’ if ‘‘law’’ is

Special Issue: Law and Literature Reconsidered

Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Volume 43, 153–172

Copyright r2008 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited

All rights of reproduction in any form reserved

ISSN: 1059-4337/doi:10.1016/S1059-4337(07)00607-2

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understood not only as legislation and litigation, but as legal philosophy,

legal history, legal scholarship, and legal education. One claim of the chapter

is that African American literature, especially the classical African American

narrative that emerges in the 1840s and begins to merge into the larger body

of American literature written by Euro-Americans in the 1950s, has as its

central concern matters of American law and that African American

literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can be profitably, indeed

perhaps ‘‘best,’’ read through lenses ground out of American law. Corollary

to that claim is the claim that using lenses ground of African American

narrative a reader can begin to see the outlines of an alternative text of

American legal history.

There are several reasons I am moved to make these claims. Some are

grounded in the more general observation that both literature and law are

narrative systems. As such, each is informed by conventions of representation

the elements of which are often closely analogous if not coterminous. So, for

example, each privileges some speech and some speakers while excluding

others; each drives toward closure; each is self-referential; each must manage,

through some authorized process of editing, the narrative elements of

character, setting,and action. This familiar list of essentializedcharacteristics,

while incomplete, stands well enough as the base for some observations. One

is that these narrative systems are not only alike in that they are systematic

sets for making meaning and both produce not only narratives but narratives

about narratives, but that they complement and compete with one another as

and for authority as social texts. The competition exists not only because they

share conventions of representation but because they share a common

subject, human relationships within social contexts played out in actions.

More specifically, in the case under consideration here, that of African

American literature and American law, both take as their subjects the

existence under the law of Africans in America and create two compelling, if

often contradictory, narrative records. There are both obvious and more

obscured elements of this problem of the creation of these texts, in the

creation of contradiction from commonality. In the first instance, for

example, African American literature exhibits a consistencyin its attention to

relationships that are also scrutinized by American law: property, contract,

identity, citizenship, crime, tort, regulation, federalism, constitutional law

and civil rights, taxation, commerce, environment, family relations and

estates, military law, petit and high treason, and corporations. For over a

century, the legal framework for defining and allocating the problems,rights,

privileges, and penalties attendant to these issues is the undergirding frame

for literary narrative as they are played out among African Americans and

JON-CHRISTIAN SUGGS154