... relationship with contract law that Black people have experienced throughout US history has uniquely positioned Black writers to produce a critical knowledge of law’s structures of power. These writers reveal the mechanisms by which legal authorities manipulated the legal contracts that as texts stipulated...

... ultimately transforms Asian Americans’ reproductive labor—their childbearing and child-rearing—into their social reproduction as a racialized class of useful, compliant workers. [email protected] Copyright © 2024 by Duke University Press 2024 Asian American literary studies contract theory...

...Sarah Ensor Abstract This article argues that pedagogy may help us respond to the precarity of higher education by reclaiming the forms of provisionality, accident, and exposure endemic to collaborative learning. Putting kinship theory into contact with studies of contagion, I suggest...

... social contract theory into prac- tice exposes the conditions and contingencies adhering in any repre- sentational system (in language or in government).3 The equality of individual white men to whom state and federal governments will be held accountable is represented through the positing of abject...

... through a talis- manic legal form. Such a reading would take for granted blacks’ legal outsidership, specifically their civil death under slave law.23 But a brief review of Anglo-American contract theory as it pertains to slave law encourages an alternate reading in which contracts, like...

... enters into the presumed safety of her husband’s legal and physical protection. Imagined as a voluntary surrender of control over her own person and property, the fiction of conjugal protection perpetuates the wife’s dependent, sub- jugated status under the guise of contract theory. Although the hus...

.... Contract was the dominant metaphor for freedom in the postbellum United States as it idealized, according to Amy Dru Stanley, the “ownership of self and voluntary exchange between individuals who were formally equal and free.” Intimations of contract theory’s contradictory liberalism...

... voice, theories of the black vernacular have long privileged antagonistic orality and public performance as the cornerstones of black culture. With his conversion from the quiet elitism of the early 1960s to the booming radicalism of the late 1960s and after, Baraka not only exemplifies this logic...

..., and perhaps best, are those whom we conjure in books in order to satisfy our desires, assuage our anxieties, implement our theories, promote our causes, and access ourselves. Speicher’s Schooling Readers offers a complementary genealogy of nineteenth-century fictional children and their instrumentality...

...-press world in which they’ve emerged, raise interesting questions about new habits of literary criticism, since their poems read both as theory and poetry. Although these poets have not yet produced a body of writing like the criticism and theory of the Language poets, their poetry reads like...

... understanding of network theory’s relevance to formal analysis. Margolis’s book has more to offer for those who study the nineteenth-century United States. She is no less theoretically sophisticated than Levine or Downes and compellingly redirects Chantal Mouffe’s, Claude Lefort’s, and even Jürgen Habermas’s...

.... Ferguson (1896). The root of this shared logic is a pragmatist theory of personhood that, first elucidated in The Common Law , is itself a remnant of racial citizenship in the United States. Pragmatism’s failure to address practically the racial discord of its era, I argue, is inseparable from its...

... imitative and derivative aesthetics with sympathy and intersubjectivity, the essay argues that texts created by and for young women can offer critical insight into the twinned processes of individuation and deindividuation at the heart of “republican” theories of the subject. That is, it contends...

... banished from U.S. civil discourse in the 1860s, while marriage had become the con- venient trope for national union in Civil War–era reunion romances, including De Forest’s own melodrama, The Bloody Chasm (1881). De Forest’s turn away from the marital contract and consent model of federal...

... throughout the novel to lose contract after contract, one chance after another for economic or professional advancement because he will not compromise the purity and integrity of his architectural vision. In the novel’s climax...

... is covered with beaded strings and belts, known as wampum.1 Exchanged during peace-treaty negotiations, wampum serves, according to a Jesuit missionary in the area, “the same func- tion as writing and contracts among us” ( JR, 40:164).2 The wampum that Kiotseaeton brings to this encounter represents...

...Avery Slater Reading Muriel Rukeyser’s 1938 long poem The Book of the Dead alongside Walter Benjamin’s theories of messianism and “profane illumination,” this essay explores how their work reconceives 1930s Marxist secular politics of redemption along postsecular lines. As a crisis in interwar...

... premised on the significance of consumer data as the raw material of economic interpretation and fixated on mathematical analysis as a source of knowledge about value. Marginalism in economic theory and realism in American literary practice were contemporaneous efforts to mediate value at a moment...

... own,” the emphasis is on how heart damage can be passed on. Trauma theory would eventually catch up to what Jacobs already sensed, that intense psychological distress lodges in the body. 10 Yet here she also theorizes that trauma’s physical component can be intersubjectively contagious. If shared...

... progeny of Adam’s bro- ken covenant with God, Man’s only chance for salvation lay in obe- dience to the terms of God’s contract with Abraham, the covenant of grace. Willard grimly reminded his audience that the covenant of grace could be an instrument of damnation as well as salvation...