In the shadow of the gallows : race, crime, and American civic identity

Resource Information

The work In the shadow of the gallows : race, crime, and American civic identity represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in University of San Diego Libraries. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

In the shadow of the gallows : race, crime, and American civic identity

Title remainder

race, crime, and American civic identity

Statement of responsibility

Jeannine Marie DeLombard

Title variation

Race, crime, and American civic identity

Creator

• DeLombard, Jeannine Marie

Subject

• African Americans -- Legal status, laws, etc. | History
• African Americans -- Race identity
• African Americans -- Race identity | History
• African Americans in literature
• African Americans in literature -- History and criticism
• American literature -- African American authors
• American literature -- African American authors | History and criticism
• Citizenship
• Citizenship -- United States
• Crime and race
• Crime and race -- United States -- History
• Criticism, interpretation, etc
• Electronic books
• History
• LITERARY CRITICISM -- American | African American
• United States
• African Americans -- Legal status, laws, etc

Genre

• Electronic books
• History
• Criticism, interpretation, etc

Language

eng

Summary

"From Puritan Execution Day rituals to gangsta rap, the black criminal has been an enduring presence in American culture. To understand why, Jeannine Marie DeLombard insists, we must set aside the lenses of pathology and persecution and instead view the African American felon from the far more revealing perspectives of publicity and personhood. When the Supreme Court declared in Dred Scott that African Americans have "no rights which the white man was bound to respect," it overlooked the right to due process, which ensured that black offenders - even slaves - appeared as persons in the eyes of the law. In the familiar account of African Americans' historical shift "from plantation to prison," we have forgotten how, for a century before the Civil War, state punishment affirmed black political membership in the breach, while a thriving popular crime literature provided early America's best-known models of individual black selfhood. Before there was the slave narrative, there was the criminal confession. Placing the black condemned at the forefront of the African American canon allows us to see how a later generation of enslaved activists - most notably, Frederick Douglass - could marshal the public presence and civic authority necessary to fashion themselves as eligible citizens. At the same time, in an era when abolitionists were charging Americans with the national crime of "manstealing," a racialized sense of culpability became equally central to white civic identity. What, for African Americans, is the legacy of a citizenship grounded in culpable personhood? For white Americans, must membership in a nation built on race slavery always betoken guilt? In the Shadow of the Gallows reads classics by J. Hector St. John de Crévecoeur, Edgar Allan Poe, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, George Lippard, and Edward Everett Hale alongside execution sermons, criminal confessions, trial transcripts, philosophical treatises, and political polemics to address fundamental questions about race, responsibility, and American civic belonging."--Project Muse

Member of

• Haney Foundation series

Cataloging source

CDX

Index

index present

Language note

In English

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

• dictionaries
• bibliography

Series statement

Haney Foundation Series