By drawing distinctions, law’s hierarchies of status and entitlement often absorb resistance and reemerge redefined. By inviting allodial farmers to prove their freedom, courts may quietly establish serfdom as their default status. In authorizing manumission, law may enable enslavers to extract more labor from those enslaved and indebt those manumitted. Yet if flexible hierarchies perpetuate subordination, they also open room for maneuver—enabling quests for self-definition for novelists to narrate.
Works by Karla FC Holloway and Erik M. Bachman explore this trope of hierarchy’s mutability in two literary traditions. Holloway shows how African American fiction has mapped the protean landscape of race privilege, within which characters sometimes succeed in reshaping the phenomenology of their oppression. Bachman uses the obscenity prosecution of naturalist literature as a peephole, framing obscenity as an aesthetic strategy of the powerless and naturalism as a strategy of governance. Both literatures portray struggles for self-possession, and offer the...
