New from Duke University Press:
Legal Fictions: Constituting Race, Composing Literature (2014), by
Karla FC Holloway (Duke University). A description from the Press:
In Legal 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's Beloved and Charles Johnson's Middle Passage as stories about personhood and property, David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man as structured by evidence law, and Nella Larsen's Passing
as 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 Fictions is a bold declaration that the black body is thoroughly bound by law and an unflinching look at the implications of that claim.
A few blurbs:
"In this wonderful book,
Karla FC Holloway illuminates legal texts with techniques and insights
derived from literary criticism and offers new interpretations of
fictional works by bringing to bear upon them knowledge derived from a
deep immersion in legal studies. This is, in short, a remarkable example
of productive interdisciplinarity from which all sorts of readers will
learn a great deal."—Randall Kennedy
"Legal Fictions represents a culmination (if not the
culmination) of Karla FC Holloway's rich corpus of criticism and
theory. As a consideration of law and literature in the construction of
race and legal fictions, it is an original intervention sure to inform
understandings of, and scholarship about, both. This book is Holloway at
her best: intelligent and thoughtful, fully in command of the critical
vocabularies that she introduces, and thoroughly knowledgeable about the
fields that she traverses."—Farah Jasmine Griffin
More information, including the TOC, is available
here.
