Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
andquot;Legal Fictions represents a culmination (if not the culmination) of Karla FC Hollowayand#39;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.andquot;
Review
andquot;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.andquot;
Review
andquot;Holloway has written a sterling account of the convergence of literary and legal narratives in constructing American racial identities . . . This book will engage scholars in African American studies and American studies in the coming years.andquot;and#160;
Review
andldquo;Hollowayand#39;s writing is elegantly structured and multifaceted; the analytical language she uses is bright with imagery.andrdquo;
Synopsis
Legal Fictions is a bold declaration that, in the U.S., the black body is thoroughly bound by law. It is an unflinchingly look at the implications of that claim and a virtuoso survey of the ways that black authors of literary fiction have engaged with the law's constructions of race since the era of slavery.
About the Author
Karla FC Holloway is James B. Duke Professor of English at Duke University, where she also holds appointments in the Law School, Women's Studies, and African and African American Studies, and is an affiliated faculty with the Institute on Care at the End of Life and the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities and History of Medicine. She serves on the Greenwall Foundation's Advisory Board in Bioethics, and was recently elected to the Hastings Center Fellows Association. Holloway is the author of BookMarks: Reading in Black and White and Codes of Conduct: Race, Ethics, and the Color of Our Character, as well as Private Bodies, Public Texts: Race, Gender, and a Cultural Bioethics and Passed On: African American Mourning Stories: A Memorial, both published by Duke University Press.