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.

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 & 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 & 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.

Reviews
"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." -- D. E. Magill * Choice *
"Holloway's writing is elegantly structured and multifaceted; the analytical language she uses is bright with imagery." -- Jo Manby * Ethnicity and Race in a Changing World *
"Karla FC Holloway's most recent book is a remarkable creative and critical work that pushes the boundaries of interdisciplinarity in law, literature, history, and critical race theory. ... Holloway uses the marginality of black literature as an argument for its central role in the legal and literary construction of nation and nationality. Finding the margins at the center and the center in the margins is precisely the kind of appealing paradox that makes this book so powerful." -- Dan Farbman * Law, Culture, and the Humanities *



Book Information
ISBN 9780822355953
Author Karla FC Holloway
Format Paperback
Page Count 176
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 245g