We somehow missed this 2012 release from the University of Pennsylvania Press:
In the Shadow of the Gallows: Race, Crime, and American Civic Identity, by
Jeannine Marie DeLombard (University of Toronto). Here's the Press's description:
From Puritan Execution Day rituals to gangsta rap, the black criminal
has been an enduring presence in American culture. To understand why,
Jeannine Marie DeLombard insists, we must set aside the lenses of
pathology and persecution and instead view the African American felon
from the far more revealing perspectives of publicity and personhood.
When the Supreme Court declared in Dred Scott that African
Americans have "no rights which the white man was bound to respect," it
overlooked the right to due process, which ensured that black
offenders—even slaves—appeared as persons in the eyes of the law. In the
familiar account of African Americans' historical shift "from
plantation to prison," we have forgotten how, for a century before the
Civil War, state punishment affirmed black political membership in the
breach, while a thriving popular crime literature provided early
America's best-known models of individual black selfhood. Before there
was the slave narrative, there was the criminal confession.
Placing
the black condemned at the forefront of the African American canon
allows us to see how a later generation of enslaved activists—most
notably, Frederick Douglass—could marshal the public presence and civic
authority necessary to fashion themselves as eligible citizens. At the
same time, in an era when abolitionists were charging Americans with the
national crime of "manstealing," a racialized sense of culpability
became equally central to white civic identity. What, for African
Americans, is the legacy of a citizenship grounded in culpable
personhood? For white Americans, must membership in a nation built on
race slavery always betoken guilt? In the Shadow of the Gallows
reads classics by J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Edgar Allan Poe,
Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, George Lippard, and Edward Everett
Hale alongside execution sermons, criminal confessions, trial
transcripts, philosophical treatises, and political polemics to address
fundamental questions about race, responsibility, and American civic
belonging.
A few blurbs:
"In her exquisitely written In the Shadow of the Gallows,
Jeannine DeLombard reads early American criminal law in conjunction with
the idea of social contract to illustrate the intricacies of political
belonging from the early Republic through the antebellum period. Through
the double helix of print and legal history, she chronicles the
metamorphic role of authorship in African Americans' bids for
enfranchisement against the backdrop of a nation entangled in
contradictory definitions of personhood and property and of criminality
and civility. Exemplary of humanities scholarship at its best, the book
establishes the connections between American literature and the African
American struggle for civic inclusion."—Priscilla Wald, Duke University
"I have long thought that DeLombard is at the absolute top of the scholars working on law and literature in North America, and In the Shadow of the Gallows confirms her status."—Alfred Brophy, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
For more information, including the TOC, follow the
link.
