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9781496848192

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See Justice Done compels readers to think again about Black life before the law while revealing an aesthetics of harm and injury that gives form to the 'incommensurable.' A difficult, unsettling journey, it takes African American writing, from early slave petitions to the contemporary novel, as riposte to a legal system that fails to imagine the Black subject. Giving blood to terms overused and emptied out, this timely book is at once chilling and analytically acute.--Colin Dayan, author of The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons, With Dogs at the Edge of Life, and In the Belly of Her Ghost: A Memoir See Justice Done cogently excavates the convergence of African American fiction and the histories in US law. Its declaration of this critical intimacy is accomplished in ways that are substantive, nuanced, and frankly brilliant. Brown's book will be indispensable, not only for understanding the relationship between law and literature, but because of its compelling exploration of how the law's 'disjuncture' and 'ambiguity' flow with unnerving ease through his distinctive and deeply engaged reading of African American fiction. Brown's necessary text proves its point--that the relationship of law to 'racialized subjects' challenges the very notions of legal freedom and fugitivity, the composition of American cultural studies, and--in 'In Formation' the final chapter's deadly serious take on Black culture's performativity, whether as entertainment or as a matter of life and death, the law, with all its incapacities, may indeed be the adjudicator that determines whether and how Black lives--be they fact or fiction--matter.--Karla FC Holloway, author of Passed On: African American Mourning Stories: A Memorial and Legal Fictions: Constituting Race, Compositing Literature

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Christopher Michael Brown is assistant professor of English at Wake Forest University, where he teaches courses on African American literature and legal culture. His research has been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Ford Foundation.

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