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"The Regulations of Robbers": Legal Fictions of Slavery and Resistance
Antioch Review, The, Spring, 2002 by Kris Anderson
"The Regulations of Robbers": Legal Fictions of Slavery and Resistance by Christina Accomando. Ohio State University, 257 pp., $22.95. Enslavement in U.S. history has been rationalized through complex narratives. In her examination of legal, political, and literary discourses of slavery and resistance, and drawing upon critical race theory and feminist legal theory, Accomando exposes instabilities, contradictions, and false neutrality within the law and other dominant narratives.
The work's greatest contribution is its approach to reading documents whose authority and truth value are taken for granted, thereby exposing gaps and subtexts. Multiple consciousness, for example, replaces false "univocality" with multiple voices and shifting perspectives. Her strategy reveals how framing operates to silence some, benefit others, and maintain the power of the dominant discourse. Accomando employs juxtaposition, lining up items we do not expect to examine together, such as legal statutes and literary narrative, or re gulations of slave reproduction and contemporary Norplant policies. An innovative aspect of Accomando's method is reading for silences, a strategy made necessary by the inherently incomplete "official" record of slavery. By reading poetry, oratory, autobiography, and legal critiques by former slaves, alongside and against statutes, court cases, and legal treatises, she uncovers omitted and marginalized stories. This allows her to consider a variety of comparisons and contrasts and multiple versions of the same event. Applying such analytic devices to a range of examples including Sojourner Truth, Phillis Wheatley, Robert Hayden, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, and others, Accomando exposes both discursive appropriations and narratives of resistance otherwise rendered invisible. Accomando poses questions such as: How do certain events and viewpoints become "facts"? What is left out of the official record? How can objects of the law be read as legal agents? Those interested in law, history, African Amer ican and feminist studies, and the family should find this work compelling.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Antioch Review, Inc.
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