Legal Fictions

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.

• Preface ixIntroduction: Bound by Law 1Intimate Intersectionalities—Scalar Reflections 5Public Fictions, Private Facts 9Simile as Precedent 13Property, Contract, and Evidentiary Values 171. The Claims of Property: On Being and Belonging 23The Capital in Question 27Imagined Liberalism 35Mapping Racial Reason 41Being in Place: Landscape, Never Inscape 492. Bodies as Evidence (of Things Not Seen) 55Secondhand Tales and Hearsay 59Black Legibility—Can I Get a Witness? 72Trying to Read Me 773. Composing Contract 89"A novel-like tenor" 93Passing and Protection 96A Secluded Colored Neighborhood 102Epilogue. When and Where "All the Dark-Glass Boys" Enter 111A Contagion of Madness 113Notes 127References 139Acknowledgments 145Index 147

"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)