African American Culture and Legal Discourse

This work examines the experiences of African Americans under the law and how African American culture has fostered a rich tradition of legal criticism. Moving between novels, music, and visual culture, the essays present race as a significant factor within legal discourse. Essays examine rights and sovereignty, violence and the law, and cultural ownership through the lens of African American culture. The volume argues that law must understand the effects of particular decisions and doctrines on African American life and culture and explores the ways in which African American cultural production has been largely centered on a critique of law.

Lovalerie King is Associate Professor of English, Affiliate Faculty in Women’s Studies, and Director of the Africana Research Center at Penn State-University Park. She is the author of Race, Theft, and Ethics: Property Matters in African American Literature and The Cambridge Introduction to Zora Neale Hurston and is the co-editor of James Baldwin and Toni Morrison: Comparative Critical and Theoretical Essays and New Essays on the African American Novel: From Hurston and Ellison to Morrison and Whitehead.

Richard Schur is Associate Professor and Director of Interdisciplinary Studies at Drury University. He is the author of Parodies of Ownership: Hip Hop Aesthetics and Intellectual Property Law. His articles and essays on African American literature, hip-hop studies, African American art, critical race theory, and intellectual property law have appeared in several edited collections and in journals such as Contemporary Literature, American Studies, African American Review, Biography, and Law & Inequality.

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Foreword	p. xi
Introduction: ôJustice Unveiledö	p. 1
Rights and Sovereignty	p. 11
Reading Back, Reading Black, and Buck v. Bell	p. 13
W. E. B. Du Bois and the Right to Privacy	p. 23
Martin R. Delany and Rhetorics of Divided Sovereignty	p. 39
On Black Freedmen in Indian Country	p. 57
It Falls to You: Rawls, Bartleby, and the Ethics of Affirmative Action in Charles Johnson's ôExecutive Decisionö	p. 75
(II) Legal Violence	p. 93
Lucy Terry: A Life of Radical Resistance	p. 95
The Fire Next Time and the Law	p. 117
ôFists and the Voices of Sorrowful Womenö: Race, Gender, Violence, and the Reconstruction of the Word in Toni Morrison's Jazz	p. 131
When Testimony Fails: Law and the Comforts of Intimacy in Gayl Jones's Corregidora	p. 159
Owning Culture	p. 175
Papa's Got a Brand New Bag: James Brown, Innovation, and Copyright Law	p. 177
Legal Fictions: Trademark Discourse and Race	p. 191
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the Overdevelopment of Gangsta Rap	p. 209
Afterword	p. 233
List of Contributors	p. 239
Index	p. 243
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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African American Culture and Legal Discourse

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