Synopses & Reviews
Neither Fugitive nor Free draws on the freedom suit as recorded in the press and court documents to offer a critically and historically engaged understanding of the freedom celebrated in the literary and cultural histories of transatlantic abolitionism. Freedom suits involved those enslaved valets, nurses, and maids who accompanied slaveholders onto free soil. Once brought into a free jurisdiction, these attendants became informally free, even if they were taken back to a slave jurisdiction—at least according to abolitionists and the enslaved themselves. In order to secure their freedom formally, slave attendants or others on their behalf had to bring suit in a court of law.
Edlie Wong critically recuperates these cases in an effort to reexamine and redefine the legal construction of freedom, will, and consent. This study places such historically central anti-slavery figures as Frederick Douglass, Olaudah Equiano, and William Lloyd Garrison alongside such lesser-known slave plaintiffs as Lucy Ann Delaney, Grace, Catharine Linda, Med, and Harriet Robinson Scott. Situated at the confluence of literary criticism, feminism, and legal history, Neither Fugitive nor Free presents the freedom suit as a "new" genre to African American and American literary studies.
Review
"An original, liberating interpretation . . . should become a standard of cultural and psychoanalytical studies." -The Guardian,
Review
"In addition to providing a strong sense of the focal cases, Wong evinces a rare willingness to consider the ways these cases were reappropriated in larger antebellum legal processes and print culture. Wong's wonderfully relentless interdisciplinarity pushes her repeatedly to analyze not simply events, but the language and rhetoric surrounding them. Her command of published sources is impressive: she deftly weaves together scholarship on law, legal history, literary criticism, political history, social history, gender theory, and ethnic studies, and she rightly insists that her subjects cannot be fully understood without recovering a richer range of voices and texts. Perhaps most importantly, Wong's book joins calls to reconsider generic definitions of slave narratives and race literature and so begins to embody the potential for broader senses of black texts and black history." -The Journal of American History,
Review
"Each of the chapters is organized around a landmark legal case, but the author complements this information with valuable information from pamphlets, magazines, casebooks, and newspaper articles, a "loose genre of antislavery literature" (p.7) that sought to discuss the implications of territorialized freedom.The study of this literature also allows the author to recover the voices and experiences of slaves otherwise absent from historical records... Neither Fugitive nor Free makes important contributions to several bodies of scholarship, notably to legal studies of slavery in an Atlantic context. Scholars of legal history, slavery, travel, and abolitionism in the Atlantic will profit from this volume."-American Historical Review,
Review
#8220;Expands the contours of African American writing and identity through meticulous reconstruction of eighteenth-and-nineteenth-century freedom suits”-American Quarterly,
Review
"Neither Fugitive nor Free's interdiciplinary and transatlantic approach usefully draws from literary criticism, critical race theory, legal history, and gender studies to provide sophisticated and revealing insights into Anglo-American understandings of and narratives about freedom and slavery."-Brian Schoen,Common-Place
Review
"A hidden face of abolitionism is revealed in Edlie L. Wong's, Fugitive nor Free, which examines freedom suits brought by black people or for them, mostly as a result of a visit to a free zone in which law was silent on slavery or in which law barred slavery."-,Early American Literature
Synopsis
The aura of passivity that has for centuries surrounded female sexuality in popular culture, psychology, and literature has, in recent years, dissipated. And yet fetishism, one of the most intriguing and mysterious forms of sexual expression, is still cast as an almost exclusively male domain. Most psychoanalytic thought, for instance, excludes the very possibility of female fetishism.
The first book on the subject, Female Fetishism engagingly documents women's involvement in this form of sexuality. Lorraine Gamman and Merja Makinen describe a wide array of female fetishisms, from the obsessional behavior of pop fans (and pop performers such as Madonna) to fetishism in advertising to women's involvement in the world of dress clubs and fetish magazines. The authors provide provocative evidence of food fetishism among women, arguing that many eating disorders are best understood from this perspective.
A latter portion of the book includes a discussion of how feminists have treated the political and cultural significance of female fetishism.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. [223]-232) and index.
About the Author
Lorraine Gamman lectures in Cultural Studies and Product Design at Central St. Martin's College of Art and Design and is a visiting tutor at Goldsmith's College, London. She is coeditor of
The Female Gaze: Women as Viewers of Popular Culture.
Anthony P. Griffin was General Counsel for the NAACP and was removed in 1993 for his representation in a first amendment case of a Grand Dragon of the Texas Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
Donald E. Lively is a Professor of Law at the University of Toledo.
Robert C. Post is a Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley.