Book description
From Puritan Execution Day rituals to gangsta rap, the black criminal
has been an enduring presence in American culture. To understand why,
Jeannine Marie DeLombard insists, we must set aside the lenses of
pathology and persecution and instead view the African American felon
from the far more revealing perspectives of publicity and personhood.
When the Supreme Court declared in Dred Scott that African
Americans have "no rights which the white man was bound to
respect," it overlooked the right to due process, which ensured
that black offenders-even slaves-appeared as persons in the eyes of
the law. In the familiar account of African Americans' historical
shift "from plantation to prison," we have forgotten how,
for a century before the Civil War, state punishment affirmed black
political membership in the breach, while a thriving popular crime
literature provided early America's best-known models of individual
black selfhood. Before there was the slave narrative, there was the
criminal confession.
Placing the black condemned at the forefront of the African
American canon allows us to see how a later generation of enslaved
activists-most notably, Frederick Douglass-could marshal the public
presence and civic authority necessary to fashion themselves as
eligible citizens. At the same time, in an era when abolitionists were
charging Americans with the national crime of "manstealing,"
a racialized sense of culpability became equally central to white
civic identity. What, for African Americans, is the legacy of a
citizenship grounded in culpable personhood? For white Americans, must
membership in a nation built on race slavery always betoken guilt?
In the Shadow of the Gallows reads classics by J. Hector St.
John de Crèvecoeur, Edgar Allan Poe, Frederick Douglass, Herman
Melville, George Lippard, and Edward Everett Hale alongside execution
sermons, criminal confessions, trial transcripts, philosophical
treatises, and political polemics to address fundamental questions
about race, responsibility, and American civic belonging.
"In her exquisitely written In the Shadow of the
Gallows, Jeannine DeLombard reads early American criminal law in
conjunction with the idea of social contract to illustrate the
intricacies of political belonging from the early Republic through the
antebellum period. Through the double helix of print and legal
history, she chronicles the metamorphic role of authorship in African
Americans' bids for enfranchisement against the backdrop of a nation
entangled in contradictory definitions of personhood and property and
of criminality and civility. Exemplary of humanities scholarship at
its best, the book establishes the connections between American
literature and the African American struggle for civic
inclusion."-Priscilla Wald, Duke University
Jeannine Marie DeLombard is Associate Professor of English at the
University of Toronto and author of Slavery on Trial: Law, Print, and
Abolitionism.
