Abstract
This impressive book examines how antebellum Black writers used legal forms and concepts to advocate for freedom and reimagine the law from a Black perspective. Black Pro Se brings African American literature and the interdisciplinary study of law into a fruitful dialogue that helps readers reconceive Black writing before the Civil War and better understand “the law” in the law and literature movement. Relying on Saidiya Hartman’s approach to the archive and subjectivity, author Faith Barter provides an insightful revisionist account of antebellum Black writing. The book also draws on Patricia Williams’s deconstruction of the legal subject in its re-fashioning of the interdisciplinary field of law and literature, opening the field to new questions and insights. Black Pro Se draws on texts written by Harriet Jacobs, Nat Turner, David Walker, Hannah Crafts, Charles Henry Langston, and others to reconceive the goals, methods, and importance of Black writing during this period.
Barter observes that the field of law and literature has generally been slow to embrace Black literature (21) and thus has missed an opportunity to examine how historically marginalized communities have conceived, used, and reinvented legal concepts. In Barter’s hands, legal thinking is smartly defined as both honoring existing precedents and institutions and imagining how to evade those decisions and legal structures (16). This allows Black Pro Se to offer a useful frame for analyzing and interpreting antebellum Black writing within the broad legal categories of evidence, advocacy, and worldmaking (15). These analytical categories reveal that freedom narratives, loosely biographical novels, and abolitionist speeches and essays from the early nineteenth century share a frequently overlooked legal orientation, which goes beyond protest literature or critiques of specific legal decisions. Barter’s approach carefully attends to the institutional forces that shaped and produced these writings, suggesting these authors carefully manipulated the discourses available to them to challenge the law of slavery. This approach, drawing on Hartman’s understanding of subjection, cautions readers not to assume these are simple texts, offering unguarded access to the thoughts and experiences of their authors. Instead, Barter reframes these writers as knowledgeable legal thinkers, even if they are not licensed attorneys, who choose to present the best possible evidence and advocacy to imagine a more just legal system. In a beautiful turn of phrase, Barter calls these writers “architects of legal possibility” (26).
Black Pro Se is organized around four building blocks of legal thinking: appeals, confessions, jurisdiction, and precedent. Each serves as a theme for a chapter and as an analytic for re-interpreting the “wordwork” of antebellum Black writers. Barter frames each of these foundational elements of legal argumentation as distinct legal forms, shaping the rhetoric, construction, and meaning of freedom narratives, political speeches, short stories, biographies, and novels. Barter’s readings highlight how texts, such as David Walker’s Appeal, “The Mulatto,” and The Life of a Slave Girl, navigate audiences and discourses to create an archive of Black experiences and thought that mediates white perspectives and reigning legal discourse while also speaking to Black audiences who draw on religious and other value systems to imagine alternative legal arrangements. The monograph’s approach to The Confessions of Nat Turner and The Bondwoman’s Narrative deserves special mention. Barter employs Nat Turner’s story, told through a white writer’s pen, to illustrate the challenge Black thinkers face in becoming speaking and writing subjects within a legal culture that deauthorizes Black voices. She reconstructs how Turner acknowledges these limitations yet speaks truth to power as best he can, given the discursive limitations. Barter argues that Hannah Craft uses her fictionalized freedom narrative to create an archive of Black experiences. In Barter’s able hands, these texts can be read to reveal the subjectivity that nineteenth-century legal and literary discourses silence and ignore.
Black Pro Se offers reparative and generative strategies for reading nineteenth-century Black texts. Barter uses the term “Afrolegalism” to denote Black perspectives on legal decisions, categories, and concepts. The book demonstrates how Black writers were well-versed in legal discourse, as the community’s survival depended on this knowledge. Black texts actively resisted and provided counterarguments to pro-slavery legal decisions. Barter’s focus on “Afrolegalism” gives a name to the intertext that connects Black writing and legal discourse, which is not merely “literature,” nor is it an imitation of dominant and “white” lawyerly or judicial utterances. Rather, it is its own body of knowledge. The purpose of “Afrolegalism,” according to Barter, is to imagine and create an alternative legal structure that could protect and liberate Black people, not merely reproduce antebellum slave law. Barter offers scholars and students a reading strategy that can excavate the hidden subjective experiences within these freedom narratives, short stories, and nonfiction writings.
The book’s coda offers a tantalizing and all-too-brief discussion of how Barter’s approach to nineteenth-century Black writing offers a throughline to contemporary Afrofuturism. By reframing antebellum Black writers as engaging in worldmaking texts that imagined alternatives to the racialized law of the nineteenth century, Barter suggests an overlap between nineteenth-century freedom narratives and contemporary science fiction and horror. While Barter does not fully pursue the argument, her approach offers a new way to conceive of African American literature. She neither grounds African American literature in specific African cultural elements, such as signifyin’ (as Henry Louis Gates does) or a specific Black Aesthetic, like the Black Art Movement. Nor does she limit African American literature, like Kenneth Warren, to a specific period in which writers challenge enslavement or segregation. Instead, she draws on legal ideas, such as appeals, confessions, precedent, and jurisdiction, to serve as focal points for writers’ efforts to re-imagine Black life in a hostile white (legal) world across the full history of African American writing in America. It is this reimagining that is a defining feature of African American literary production.
My wish as a reader was for Barter to have gone into more detail in her discussion and analysis of the main texts. The book is more oriented to making a theoretical intervention than offering systematic readings of the texts discussed. Because the book covers so much ground, a handful of textual moments in Jacobs, Craft, Walker, and Turner serve as models of the reading practices she argues for, rather than systematic analyses. The short sections on “The Mulatto,” “Theresa, _____ a Haytien Tale,” and James Williams/Thornton/Wilkins beg for more attention. The book might have been better served with fewer case studies that dug deeper. This minor shortcoming, however, does not detract from the book’s insight and importance.
Scholars of African American literature and law and literature will find many theoretical insights to deepen their understanding of the interface between fiction and legal discourse. Cultural theorists will also benefit from the careful way Barter conceptualizes and interprets nineteenth-century Black writing when dominant discourse refused to acknowledge the subjectivity of Black people. Barter offers a model for how scholars can read Black literature and other decolonial writing against the grain. Black Pro Se also offers a provocation to law and literature. By framing legal themes broadly, Barter reveals how African American and other writers from marginalized groups deploy legal concepts to reimagine their world. This is an excellent addition to the scholarship of antebellum Black literature and to the field of law and literature.