Faith Barter
Vanderbilt University
I am a Lecturer in English and Women's and Gender Studies at Vanderbilt University, where I recently completed my PhD in English. Prior to beginning graduate school, I practiced law in Washington, D.C. I am currently completing a book project on antebellum African American literature as a form of legal advocacy.
For those of us working in the nineteenth century, present-day incidences of racialized violence are always just the tip of a much longer historical iceberg. Dominant cultural narratives, however, insist that protests are... [ view full abstract ]
For those of us working in the nineteenth century, present-day incidences of racialized violence are always just the tip of a much longer historical iceberg. Dominant cultural narratives, however, insist that protests are unseemly. We are urged instead that sites of law are spaces in which to resolve conflicts with respectability, order, and—ostensibly—civility. In my paper, I trace a very different history in legal language and legal fictions in particular. I examine several different analogies that law has used to describe or characterize Black bodies. In these analogies—to chattel, to land, to indigents, and to unkillable superhumans—I argue that the discourse of civility in law masks a killing field, in which law desperately tries to contain Black bodies in language. When it cannot, it inevitably resorts to violence.
To make this history visible, I will stitch together examples from an early nineteenth-century Virginia state and the sentencing of Nat Turner. Finally, I will introduce language from the grand jury that considered whether to indict Darren Wilson for Michael Brown’s killing. I argue that the nineteenth century legal fictions around Blackness remain alive and well in the law enforcement documents that reflect racialized violence committed by police in the present day.
Proposed extracted primary document: Depending on the preference of the organizers, I will include either an 1805 Virginia statute or a medical examiner’s report from the Ferguson grand jury documents.
