The Fugitive's Properties: Law and the Poetics of PossessionIn this study of literature and law before and since the Civil War, Stephen M. Best shows how American conceptions of slavery, property, and the idea of the fugitive were profoundly interconnected. The Fugitive's Properties uncovers a poetics of intangible, personified property emerging out of antebellum laws, circulating through key nineteenth-century works of literature, and informing cultural forms such as blackface minstrelsy and early race films. Best also argues that legal principles dealing with fugitives and indebted persons provided a sophisticated precursor to intellectual property law as it dealt with rights in appearance, expression, and other abstract aspects of personhood. In this conception of property as fleeting, indeed fugitive, American law preserved for much of the rest of the century slavery's most pressing legal imperative: the production of personhood as a market commodity. By revealing the paradoxes of this relationship between fugitive slave law and intellectual property law, Best helps us to understand how race achieved much of its force in the American cultural imagination. A work of ambitious scope and compelling cross-connections, The Fugitive's Properties sets new agendas for scholars of American literature and legal culture. |
From inside the book
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Page xi
... intellectual pursuit. At Penn, Houston A. Baker Jr., Eric Cheyfitz, and Lynda Hart were always available when guidance, readings, bibliographies, and other academic goods often taken for granted were in need. A special word of immense ...
... intellectual pursuit. At Penn, Houston A. Baker Jr., Eric Cheyfitz, and Lynda Hart were always available when guidance, readings, bibliographies, and other academic goods often taken for granted were in need. A special word of immense ...
Page 14
... intellectual property rights in one's countenance , vocal style , ideas and thoughts , literary expressions , and other aspects of person- ality , which together gain legal ascendancy in the wake of the introduction of numerous ...
... intellectual property rights in one's countenance , vocal style , ideas and thoughts , literary expressions , and other aspects of person- ality , which together gain legal ascendancy in the wake of the introduction of numerous ...
Page 15
... intellectual property law that seeks to protect forms of personhood as property ( e.g. , voice , ideas , countenance ) . In the argument that unfolds over the forthcoming pages , turn - of - the - century intellectual property law ...
... intellectual property law that seeks to protect forms of personhood as property ( e.g. , voice , ideas , countenance ) . In the argument that unfolds over the forthcoming pages , turn - of - the - century intellectual property law ...
Page 16
... intellectual property law in the late nineteenth century and continues into the twentieth. The issues of personhood and property that slavery elaborates and the issues emanating from the emerging law on intellectual property are part of ...
... intellectual property law in the late nineteenth century and continues into the twentieth. The issues of personhood and property that slavery elaborates and the issues emanating from the emerging law on intellectual property are part of ...
Page 17
... intellectual property law face ( and achieve compelling resolutions of ) the paradox of the com- modity form ; whose value , in exchange , as Marx theorized , appears neither entirely material and within reach nor entirely ideal and ...
... intellectual property law face ( and achieve compelling resolutions of ) the paradox of the com- modity form ; whose value , in exchange , as Marx theorized , appears neither entirely material and within reach nor entirely ideal and ...
Contents
1 | |
27 | |
Chapter Two The Fugitives Properties Uncle Toms Incalculable Dividend | 99 |
Chapter Three Counterfactuals Causation and the Tenses of Separate but Equal | 201 |
The Rules of the Game | 269 |
Notes | 277 |
Index | 353 |
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The Fugitive's Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession Stephen M. Best No preview available - 2004 |
Common terms and phrases
abstraction aesthetic Amendment appears authority autopoesis blackface body cakewalk Cambridge capital causation century Chicago cinema claim clause common law conception Constitution contract corporation counterfactual credit economy culture doctrine Dred Scott duden economic equal protection Essays exchange expression fiction figure film Fourteenth Amendment Fugitive Slave Fugitive Slave Law Harriet Beecher Stowe Holmes imagination intellectual property interest Jeremy Bentham Justice labor language Law Review law's literary logic matter means ment metaphor metonymy minstrel moral musical narrative natural Negro nineteenth-century object Oliver Wendell Holmes original Oxford passion person personhood play Plessy political principle production property law property rights race racial rational relation repetition reprint rhetoric sentiment slavery social specific speculative Stanley Fish Stowe Stowe's theft theory thing tion Tom’s Topsy Tourgée trans transformation translation turn-of-the-century U.S. Supreme Court Uncle Tom's Cabin University Press words York
Popular passages
Page 10 - A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law. Being the mere creature of law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it, either expressly or as incidental to its very existence.
Page 217 - The argument necessarily assumes that if, as has been more than once the case,' and is not unlikely to be so again, the colored race should become the dominant power in the state legislature, and should enact a law in precisely similar terms, it would thereby relegate the white race to an inferior position. We imagine that the white race, at least, would not acquiesce in this assumption.
Page 69 - And no word can be found in the Constitution which gives Congress a greater power over slave property, or which entitles property of that kind to less protection than property of any other description.
Page 171 - ... and with proof, also by affidavit, of the identity of the person whose service or labor is claimed to be due as aforesaid, that the person so arrested does in fact owe service or labor to the person or persons claiming him or her, in the state or territory from which such fugitive may have escaped as aforesaid...
Page 275 - Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.
Page 10 - It is chiefly for the purpose of clothing bodies of men in succession with these qualities and capacities that corporations were invented and are in use. By these means, a perpetual succession of individuals are capable of acting for the promotion of the particular object, like one immortal being.
Page 217 - A]mendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but, in the nature of things, it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguish distinguished from political equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either.
Page 159 - By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him...
Page 173 - What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.