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 4
... conse- quence of the disunion of the king's natural body from his body politic , the kingdom is transferred or demised to his successor ; and so the royal dignity remains perpetual . The king is , in short , two persons in 4 INTRODUCTION.
... conse- quence of the disunion of the king's natural body from his body politic , the kingdom is transferred or demised to his successor ; and so the royal dignity remains perpetual . The king is , in short , two persons in 4 INTRODUCTION.
Page 5
... short , two persons in one , a natural king and a supernatu- ral king , a " body natural " and a " body politic " ( as Plowden himself drew the distinction prior to Blackstone ) . " King " is a persona mixta . While the king's ...
... short , two persons in one , a natural king and a supernatu- ral king , a " body natural " and a " body politic " ( as Plowden himself drew the distinction prior to Blackstone ) . " King " is a persona mixta . While the king's ...
Page 9
... short , " that when a person held to service or labor in any State or Territory of the United States has heretofore or shall hereafter escape into another State or Territory of the United States , the person or persons to whom such ...
... short , " that when a person held to service or labor in any State or Territory of the United States has heretofore or shall hereafter escape into another State or Territory of the United States , the person or persons to whom such ...
Page 15
... short , that the legal relations of property are between people and not , as had earlier been thought , between people and things . The law ensures the obstinacy and constancy of property ( the expected calculability and profitability ...
... short , that the legal relations of property are between people and not , as had earlier been thought , between people and things . The law ensures the obstinacy and constancy of property ( the expected calculability and profitability ...
Page 24
... short , analogy proffers a type of causality , and New Historicist method a " causality " more subtle than is often implied by that term . This subtler form of causality I would describe as " the agency of form " and would locate its ...
... short , analogy proffers a type of causality , and New Historicist method a " causality " more subtle than is often implied by that term . This subtler form of causality I would describe as " the agency of form " and would locate its ...
Contents
Fugitive Sound Fungible Personhood Evanescent Property | 29 |
Copyright Law | 41 |
The Human Phonograph | 54 |
Dred Scott v Sandford | 65 |
Impersonation | 89 |
The Fugitives Properties Uncle Toms Incalculable Dividend | 101 |
Pro Bono Publico | 115 |
Toms par me la | 136 |
Cuttin of Figgers | 185 |
Counterfactuals Causation and the Tenses of Separate but Equal | 203 |
Parallel Tracks | 228 |
What Happened in the Tunnel | 256 |
The Rules of the Game | 269 |
Principle and History | 271 |
Procedure and Pragmatism | 274 |
Notes | 277 |
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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's Properties Harriet Beecher Stowe Holmes Holmes's 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 Plessy political principle production property law property rights race racial relation repetition reprint rhetoric sentiment slavery social specific speculative Stanley Fish Stowe Stowe's Taney's theft theory thing tion Topsy Tourgée trans transformation translation trompe l'oeil 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 7 - Yet that we may not appear to be defective even in earthly honors, let a day be solemnly set apart for proclaiming the charter; let it be brought forth placed on the divine law, the word of God; let a crown be placed thereon, by which the world may know, that so far as we approve of monarchy, that in America THE LAW 1s KING. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.
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.