"There are no answers, easy or hard, in With Dogs at the Edge of Life, and this, finally, may be ... more "There are no answers, easy or hard, in With Dogs at the Edge of Life, and this, finally, may be the point. “The bold enmeshing of humans and dogs—and the seagulls, pigeons, chickens, and cats in their midst—requires that we suspend our beliefs and put aside our craving for final answers.” The answers are themselves the problem. We have—by force, persuasion, and trickery—been drawn to a single answer: money and the comforts it buys."
and the diminution of the jury, even as Dzur, and many other scholars, recognize the serious dama... more and the diminution of the jury, even as Dzur, and many other scholars, recognize the serious damage it does to our legal system. Lastly, pragmatically, it is challenging to envision how we mobilize for more juror participation: How do we get more people to serve? How do we find time in court calendars for case processing? For the appeals and retrials of sentencing? I pose these questions as much for Dzur as for the next scholar-or the interested readers this book will find among political scientists, criminologists, jury scholars, and other sociolegal students/thinkers-whom I hope will continue the terrific conversation Dzur takes up about the good that juries do, for the system and for the jurors, and how we might harness that good to create a more just system.
"[T]his work by Dayan is one of the most valuable contemporary books on law and society to come o... more "[T]his work by Dayan is one of the most valuable contemporary books on law and society to come out in quite some time. . . . The Law is a White Dog is an innovative, highly intellectual book . . ." --Choice
"Dayan succeeds mightily in her dismal project. The tale is told via death-row chain gangs, cell-extraction with dogs, a rare first-hand report on the horrors of supermax prisons…. The book is defined by three extraordinary strengths. First, its moral force is as direct as that of Charles Dickens, Émile Zola or Henry Mayhew. Second, I have never read a better use made of case law: Dayan knows the importance of legal decisions but is not bound by them, and is always aware that their hinterland matters much more than their formal prose...Third and best, the book takes the margins and makes them central...these features help to make it a triumph of style as well as of substance." --Conor Gearty, Times Higher Education
" Written by an author well known for previous interdisciplinary work in cultural studies and law, this book is a must-have for both general academic libraries and academic law libraries…. Dayan's deconstruction highlights the law as a key mechanism for social control, rather than a narrow area of professional discourse or procedural system that touches only a small segment of society. The Law Is a White Dog will prove valuable for anyone who seeks a comprehensive, critical understanding of our society and the role played in it by the law." --Law Library Journal
"A cumulative masterpiece of probing, relevant erudition. . . . More concerned with conceptual structures than local specifics, Dayan breaks rich new critical ground on the well-trodden path from plantation to prison. [A] stunningly insightful yet painstaking inquiry into the very real effects of the ongoing legal and cultural project of defining the boundaries of personhood." --American Literature
From the Inside Flap
"Colin Dayan's engagement with what she calls the sorcery of the law leads her to trouble narrative movements from ignorance to knowledge, animality to humanity, barbarism to enlightenment, slavery to freedom. In the process she urges us to recognize how legal technologies that once sustained a core contradiction of slavery--that slaves were only accorded legal personality when they committed a crime--now relegate millions of incarcerated persons to civil death. The Law is a White Dog compels us to acknowledge how the ghosts of slavery continue to animate institutions--from Guantanamo to the supermax--that thrive on racialized violence today."--Angela Y. Davis, professor emerita, University of California, Santa Cruz
"In language that is searing and lyrical, evocative and precise, this exceptional book thinks with the zombies, specters, felons, slaves, dogs, cadavers, and other entities that are the remnants of loss and dispossession in the law. Dogs and people are abundantly present here, even as the legal fictions they are made to inhabit are exposed with acid lucidity. These are hard histories made readable by Dayan's precious acts of writing."--Donna J. Haraway, author of When Species Meet
"This is truly an extraordinary book, one which will become a classic of interdisciplinary legal scholarship. Combining memoir, literary criticism, history, cultural studies, and analysis of legal doctrine, this is a fascinating tour de force."--Austin Sarat, Amherst College
A return to the Graduate Center and reflections on how law demarcates a genealogy of slavery and ... more A return to the Graduate Center and reflections on how law demarcates a genealogy of slavery and involuntary servitude, the enduring logic of domination and exclusion. Thinking with and through Melville:::::
Take Paterson, and imagine approaching Williams’s language experiment—his craft of particulars—wi... more Take Paterson, and imagine approaching Williams’s language experiment—his craft of particulars—with dogs on the mind. It’s not too far-fetched, since he begins with a preface that marks the shifting and speed of the poem in a way that cannot easily be put aside.....
"There are no answers, easy or hard, in With Dogs at the Edge of Life, and this, finally, may be ... more "There are no answers, easy or hard, in With Dogs at the Edge of Life, and this, finally, may be the point. “The bold enmeshing of humans and dogs—and the seagulls, pigeons, chickens, and cats in their midst—requires that we suspend our beliefs and put aside our craving for final answers.” The answers are themselves the problem. We have—by force, persuasion, and trickery—been drawn to a single answer: money and the comforts it buys."
and the diminution of the jury, even as Dzur, and many other scholars, recognize the serious dama... more and the diminution of the jury, even as Dzur, and many other scholars, recognize the serious damage it does to our legal system. Lastly, pragmatically, it is challenging to envision how we mobilize for more juror participation: How do we get more people to serve? How do we find time in court calendars for case processing? For the appeals and retrials of sentencing? I pose these questions as much for Dzur as for the next scholar-or the interested readers this book will find among political scientists, criminologists, jury scholars, and other sociolegal students/thinkers-whom I hope will continue the terrific conversation Dzur takes up about the good that juries do, for the system and for the jurors, and how we might harness that good to create a more just system.
"[T]his work by Dayan is one of the most valuable contemporary books on law and society to come o... more "[T]his work by Dayan is one of the most valuable contemporary books on law and society to come out in quite some time. . . . The Law is a White Dog is an innovative, highly intellectual book . . ." --Choice
"Dayan succeeds mightily in her dismal project. The tale is told via death-row chain gangs, cell-extraction with dogs, a rare first-hand report on the horrors of supermax prisons…. The book is defined by three extraordinary strengths. First, its moral force is as direct as that of Charles Dickens, Émile Zola or Henry Mayhew. Second, I have never read a better use made of case law: Dayan knows the importance of legal decisions but is not bound by them, and is always aware that their hinterland matters much more than their formal prose...Third and best, the book takes the margins and makes them central...these features help to make it a triumph of style as well as of substance." --Conor Gearty, Times Higher Education
" Written by an author well known for previous interdisciplinary work in cultural studies and law, this book is a must-have for both general academic libraries and academic law libraries…. Dayan's deconstruction highlights the law as a key mechanism for social control, rather than a narrow area of professional discourse or procedural system that touches only a small segment of society. The Law Is a White Dog will prove valuable for anyone who seeks a comprehensive, critical understanding of our society and the role played in it by the law." --Law Library Journal
"A cumulative masterpiece of probing, relevant erudition. . . . More concerned with conceptual structures than local specifics, Dayan breaks rich new critical ground on the well-trodden path from plantation to prison. [A] stunningly insightful yet painstaking inquiry into the very real effects of the ongoing legal and cultural project of defining the boundaries of personhood." --American Literature
From the Inside Flap
"Colin Dayan's engagement with what she calls the sorcery of the law leads her to trouble narrative movements from ignorance to knowledge, animality to humanity, barbarism to enlightenment, slavery to freedom. In the process she urges us to recognize how legal technologies that once sustained a core contradiction of slavery--that slaves were only accorded legal personality when they committed a crime--now relegate millions of incarcerated persons to civil death. The Law is a White Dog compels us to acknowledge how the ghosts of slavery continue to animate institutions--from Guantanamo to the supermax--that thrive on racialized violence today."--Angela Y. Davis, professor emerita, University of California, Santa Cruz
"In language that is searing and lyrical, evocative and precise, this exceptional book thinks with the zombies, specters, felons, slaves, dogs, cadavers, and other entities that are the remnants of loss and dispossession in the law. Dogs and people are abundantly present here, even as the legal fictions they are made to inhabit are exposed with acid lucidity. These are hard histories made readable by Dayan's precious acts of writing."--Donna J. Haraway, author of When Species Meet
"This is truly an extraordinary book, one which will become a classic of interdisciplinary legal scholarship. Combining memoir, literary criticism, history, cultural studies, and analysis of legal doctrine, this is a fascinating tour de force."--Austin Sarat, Amherst College
A return to the Graduate Center and reflections on how law demarcates a genealogy of slavery and ... more A return to the Graduate Center and reflections on how law demarcates a genealogy of slavery and involuntary servitude, the enduring logic of domination and exclusion. Thinking with and through Melville:::::
Take Paterson, and imagine approaching Williams’s language experiment—his craft of particulars—wi... more Take Paterson, and imagine approaching Williams’s language experiment—his craft of particulars—with dogs on the mind. It’s not too far-fetched, since he begins with a preface that marks the shifting and speed of the poem in a way that cannot easily be put aside.....
Drawing from legal stories of canine profiling, an exploration of the ways that, where dogs are... more Drawing from legal stories of canine profiling, an exploration of the ways that, where dogs are concerned, especially, ideas of personhood and the meaning of cruelty are sorely tested in ways that reveal how, in these narratives, a certain kind of dog and a certain kind of man are at risk, threatened by the peculiar vigilance that comes with socially sanctioned inequity.
The voice belongs to the family group dead and alive. We walk by their leave, for planted in the ... more The voice belongs to the family group dead and alive. We walk by their leave, for planted in the soil, we must walk over them to get where we are going.
Just as the terminology of slavery has disappeared from majority legal opinions, the theoretical ... more Just as the terminology of slavery has disappeared from majority legal opinions, the theoretical embrace of academically sanctioned and humane euphemisms has helped to obscure the most radical redefinition of personhood and property since slavery in the Americas. My ghost story, then, should be seen as a necessary ritual or remembrance. As captured in Mumia Abu-Jamal's Live from Death Row or Sister Helen Prejean's Dead Man Walking, the idea of the incarcerated as the living dead is not ancient history.
During my last visit to Haiti, I heard a story about a white dog. Starving, its eyes gone wild, i... more During my last visit to Haiti, I heard a story about a white dog. Starving, its eyes gone wild, it appears late at night with its tongue hanging out. Reclaimed by an oungan or priest who "deals with both hands," practicing "bad" magic, the dog comes back to life in skin bloated with spirit. A friend called it "the dog without skin," but this creature was not a dog. Instead, when a person died, the spirit, once stolen by the oungan, awakened from what had seemed sure death into this new existence in canine disguise. We all agreed that no manhandled spirit would want to end up reborn in the skin of the dog. Being turned into a dog was bad enough, but to end up losing color, to turn white, seemed worse. In this metamorphosis, the skin of the dead person is left behind, like the skin discarded by a snake. But the person's spirit remains immured in the coarse envelope, locked in another form, trapped in something not his or her own. I begin with this story, evidence of what some call the "supernatural," as entry into my discussion of the sorcery of law: most instrumental when most fantastic and most violent when most spectral. In analyzing how the rhetoric of law both disables civil persons and invents legal slaves, I argue that the creation of an artificial person in law, whether the civil body, the legal slave, or the felon rendered dead in law, takes place in a world where the supernatural serves as the infallible mechanism of justice. From its beginnings, law traded on the lure of the spirit, banking on religion and the debate on matter and spirit, corporal and incorporal,
For the most part, democracy is simply presumed to exist in the United States. It is viewed as a ... more For the most part, democracy is simply presumed to exist in the United States. It is viewed as a completed project rather than as a goal to be achieved. Fifteen leading scholars challenge that stasis in Materializing Democracy . They aim to reinvigorate the idea of democracy by placing it in the midst of a contentious political and cultural fray, which, the volume’s editors argue, is exactly where it belongs. Drawing on literary criticism, cultural studies, history, legal studies, and political theory, the essays collected here highlight competing definitions and practices of democracy—in politics, society, and, indeed, academia. Covering topics ranging from rights discourse to Native American performance, from identity politics to gay marriage, and from rituals of public mourning to the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, the contributors seek to understand the practices, ideas, and material conditions that enable or foreclose democracy’s possibilities. Through readings of subjects as diverse as Will Rogers, Alexis de Tocqueville, slave narratives, interactions along the Texas-Mexico border, and liberal arts education, the contributors also explore ways of making democracy available for analysis. Materializing Democracy suggests that attention to disparate narratives is integral to the development of more complex, vibrant versions of democracy. Contributors . Lauren Berlant, Wendy Brown, Chris Castiglia, Russ Castronovo, Joan Dayan, Wai Chee Dimock, Lisa Duggan, Richard R. Flores, Kevin Gaines, Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, Michael Moon, Dana D. Nelson, Christopher Newfield, Donald E. Pease
Page 1. TRANSITION O Under Review GOTHIC NAIPAUL Joan Dayan ... 158 TRANSITION ISSUE 59 Discussed... more Page 1. TRANSITION O Under Review GOTHIC NAIPAUL Joan Dayan ... 158 TRANSITION ISSUE 59 Discussed in this essay London Calling: VS Naipaul, Travel Writer and Postcolonial Man-darin, Rob Nixon, New York: Oxford University Press Page 2. ...
What do humans, dogs and spirits have in common? wonders Colin Dayan at the beginning of her book... more What do humans, dogs and spirits have in common? wonders Colin Dayan at the beginning of her book The Law is a White Dog. Her answer is not long in coming: they all share the way in which the law makes and unmakes their personhood; in other words, how the law can consider them as persons or objects—or even both at once— depending on the context and the historical circumstances. With this in mind, Dayan embarks on the arduous task of studying how slaves, prisoners, things, dogs and spirits can gain or lose personhood through the law, and how through these processes ‘disabled entities’ can be created. Dayan uses dogs and ghosts to enter into that realm where dispossessions and incapacitations materialise, where some human and non-human entities are placed beyond the boundaries of the community and at the edges of civilisation, in an area haunted by criminals, outcasts, beasts and monsters where myth and reality intertwine, showing in flesh what it means to be ‘creatures of the law’. D...
Page 1. HAITI. HISTORY. ' IOAN DAYAN Page 2. Page 3. A CENTENNIAL BOOK One h... more Page 1. HAITI. HISTORY. ' IOAN DAYAN Page 2. Page 3. A CENTENNIAL BOOK One hundred be >oks J , published between 1990 and 1995 bear this special imprint of the University of California Press. We have chosen each ...
are "more compelling because more akin to our experience of mystery in the world." Considering Ed... more are "more compelling because more akin to our experience of mystery in the world." Considering Edith Wharton's short story "The Duchess at Prayer," Eleanor Dwight reveals the influence of Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado" on both language and details of plot and setting. Kent Ljungquist persuasively argues that Poe's "Eleonora" influenced language and imagery in Scott Fitzgerald's This of Paradise, and that Poe's "To Helen" shaped such elements in Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night. Carol Marshall Peirce documents a clear affinity between Poe and J. R. R. Tolkien; Maurice J. Bennett illuminates the Poe-Borges relationship, showing the influence of "William Wilson" on "Deutsches Requiem." Fisher himself demonstrates that Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death" influenced both Stephen King's flawed novel, The Shining, and John Dickson Carr's admirable one, Corpse in the Waxworks. Linda E. McDaniel makes evident that Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" critically affected the tone and plot of William Styron's Set This House on Fire; Craig Werner examines the influence of Poe's "The Raven," "The Fall of the House of Usher," and other works on Ishmael Reed's novels The FreeLance Pallbearers, The Last Days of Louisiana Red, and Flight to Canada. Finally, D. M. McKeithan and Henry Wells elaborate upon the lives of two great scholars, Killis Campbell and Thomas Ollive Mabbott-men who were vitally influenced by Poe, and who, in turn, vitally influenced our understanding of him. Clearly, as this fine volume attests, a variety of important writers have been vitally influenced by Poe. Yet perhaps, I wondered, as I finished Fisher's book, casting back to that afternoon in the Endicott Bookstore, the word "influenced" be, in some cases, too weak. I vividly remember that in response to my inquiry as to whether Poe had influenced Isaac Bashevis Singer had paused from inscribing my book, turned up to me with gleeful eyes and grin, and declared, emphatically, "Not 'influenced'-'inspired'!"
This article seeks to make sense of the diverse and contradictory materials of law that intervene... more This article seeks to make sense of the diverse and contradictory materials of law that intervene in everyday life through strategies of containment, exclusion, and extermination. The prison is now the central public institution in the United States. Though hidden from sight, it defines our society in profound ways. Concentrating on the recent hunger strikes in the security housing units (SHUs) of Pelican Bay and throughout the California prison system, this essay reflects on the long reach and myriad forms of law in our penal archipelago. The new global order of justice not only focuses on those accused of criminal acts but also targets the racially suspect, the poor, the expendable. Why should we—those of us inside the privileged circle of life, free of police power, secure in our jobs, still in our homes—fear encountering the long arm of “The Patriot Act” or “The Military Commissions Act”? Why should we fear the political expediency of “preventive detention” for those considered ...
New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids, 2015
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-No... more This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported (cc-by-nc 3.0) License.
Both a tribute and ritual of remembrance, “And then came culture” elaborates the intensely politi... more Both a tribute and ritual of remembrance, “And then came culture” elaborates the intensely political critique that Trouillot commanded throughout his life. Whether writing about Haiti, the silences of history, neocolonialism, or the relations between state and nation, he fought hard against the academic generalities and benign consensus that hid the realities of racism and erasure. One of the words that most haunted him—its uses and abuses—was the word “culture.” I trace that compelling concern throughout his work, most especially in a piece called “Adieu, Culture: A New Duty Arises,” a necessary warning about and corrective to the limits of liberal discourse.
Even when it comes to "being a guerilla," a label alone does not render a person susceptible to e... more Even when it comes to "being a guerilla," a label alone does not render a person susceptible to execution or other criminal punishment.-Justice Anthony Stevens, in response to Justice Clarence Thomas's dissent in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld How simple would be the tasks of constitutional adjudication and of law generally if specific problems could be solved by inspection of the labels pasted on them!-Chief Justice Earl Warren, Trop v. Dulles New World Security As the White House of George W. Bush continues to incarcerate the innocent in Guantánamo Bay, to rewrite international law, and to use techniques that are cruel, inhuman, and degrading, we read complaints about an administration outside the law, secret CIA sites that are lawless, and "war prisons" that create a legal vacuum for more than thirty thousand detainees in U.S. military prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay. However, being outside legality might not be the point. Before the "global war on terror" and the export of local prison practice to a network of overseas prisons, numerous U.S. Supreme Court decisions in dialogue with prison
I knew a person in Christ above fourteen years ago, (whether in the body, I cannot tell; or wheth... more I knew a person in Christ above fourteen years ago, (whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;) such an one caught up to the third heaven.
This review examines material published in the field of animal studies in 2015. An immense amount... more This review examines material published in the field of animal studies in 2015. An immense amount of work on animal issues appeared during this period in the form of monographs, journal issues, and edited collections. Rather than trying to canvass all this material here, I have chosen to review monographs that develop novel arguments and make important contributions to existing debates in the field. As with last year's review, I have included writings from both animal studies and critical animal studies, and have focused on material that will be of most interest to readers of this journal. The books discussed here are divided into three sections: 1. Empathy, Lori Gruen, a longtime activist and scholar of animal liberation, has for the past several years been developing a robust conception of animal ethics based on feminist care ethics and affective relationality. In Entangled Empathy: An Alternative Ethic for Our Relationships with Animals (Lantern [2015]) she develops and defends this approach, with specific emphasis given to the concept of empathy and its central role in developing an affirmative approach to animal issues. Gruen is trained and situated squarely within the analytic philosophical tradition and also possesses an admirable understanding of the current scientific literature on animals and empathy; thus, she is well placed to illuminate both the strengths and weaknesses of standard philosophical approaches to animal issues. She sharply differentiates her own work from projects like Peter Singer's and Tom Regan's, arguing that these philosophers have developed frameworks that encourage us to abstract ourselves from the specific contexts in which we make ethical decisions and from the particular relations that should inform our ethical reasoning. Along with Carol Adams, Josephine Donovan, and most other pro-animal feminist
What happens to the person who exists in dialogue with walls? Who stands only to bear witness to ... more What happens to the person who exists in dialogue with walls? Who stands only to bear witness to his own incapacitation? In self-willed ascesis, Bartleby stands forth as if a monk, a body worked up into spirit, a ghost of impairment that becomes the host of plenitude. What is the meaning of the portable green screen, first put up by the narrator so that he can command as if a disembodied voice, and then removed, leaving Bartleby the motionless occupant of a room? In this time of unrelenting taxonomies, when persons became things—either perishables in the market or fi xtures on land— and where felons died in law but lived in fact, Bartleby stands at the limit screen or chancel of these categories, destabilizing the defi nitions crucial not only to property in slaves but to the regulatory beneficence of civil society.
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Books by Colin Dayan
www.insidehighered.com/views/2015/12/16/review-colin-dayan-dogs-edge-life
"Dayan succeeds mightily in her dismal project. The tale is told via death-row chain gangs, cell-extraction with dogs, a rare first-hand report on the horrors of supermax prisons…. The book is defined by three extraordinary strengths. First, its moral force is as direct as that of Charles Dickens, Émile Zola or Henry Mayhew. Second, I have never read a better use made of case law: Dayan knows the importance of legal decisions but is not bound by them, and is always aware that their hinterland matters much more than their formal prose...Third and best, the book takes the margins and makes them central...these features help to make it a triumph of style as well as of substance." --Conor Gearty, Times Higher Education
" Written by an author well known for previous interdisciplinary work in cultural studies and law, this book is a must-have for both general academic libraries and academic law libraries…. Dayan's deconstruction highlights the law as a key mechanism for social control, rather than a narrow area of professional discourse or procedural system that touches only a small segment of society. The Law Is a White Dog will prove valuable for anyone who seeks a comprehensive, critical understanding of our society and the role played in it by the law." --Law Library Journal
"A cumulative masterpiece of probing, relevant erudition. . . . More concerned with conceptual structures than local specifics, Dayan breaks rich new critical ground on the well-trodden path from plantation to prison. [A] stunningly insightful yet painstaking inquiry into the very real effects of the ongoing legal and cultural project of defining the boundaries of personhood." --American Literature
From the Inside Flap
"Colin Dayan's engagement with what she calls the sorcery of the law leads her to trouble narrative movements from ignorance to knowledge, animality to humanity, barbarism to enlightenment, slavery to freedom. In the process she urges us to recognize how legal technologies that once sustained a core contradiction of slavery--that slaves were only accorded legal personality when they committed a crime--now relegate millions of incarcerated persons to civil death. The Law is a White Dog compels us to acknowledge how the ghosts of slavery continue to animate institutions--from Guantanamo to the supermax--that thrive on racialized violence today."--Angela Y. Davis, professor emerita, University of California, Santa Cruz
"In language that is searing and lyrical, evocative and precise, this exceptional book thinks with the zombies, specters, felons, slaves, dogs, cadavers, and other entities that are the remnants of loss and dispossession in the law. Dogs and people are abundantly present here, even as the legal fictions they are made to inhabit are exposed with acid lucidity. These are hard histories made readable by Dayan's precious acts of writing."--Donna J. Haraway, author of When Species Meet
"This is truly an extraordinary book, one which will become a classic of interdisciplinary legal scholarship. Combining memoir, literary criticism, history, cultural studies, and analysis of legal doctrine, this is a fascinating tour de force."--Austin Sarat, Amherst College
Talks by Colin Dayan
www.insidehighered.com/views/2015/12/16/review-colin-dayan-dogs-edge-life
"Dayan succeeds mightily in her dismal project. The tale is told via death-row chain gangs, cell-extraction with dogs, a rare first-hand report on the horrors of supermax prisons…. The book is defined by three extraordinary strengths. First, its moral force is as direct as that of Charles Dickens, Émile Zola or Henry Mayhew. Second, I have never read a better use made of case law: Dayan knows the importance of legal decisions but is not bound by them, and is always aware that their hinterland matters much more than their formal prose...Third and best, the book takes the margins and makes them central...these features help to make it a triumph of style as well as of substance." --Conor Gearty, Times Higher Education
" Written by an author well known for previous interdisciplinary work in cultural studies and law, this book is a must-have for both general academic libraries and academic law libraries…. Dayan's deconstruction highlights the law as a key mechanism for social control, rather than a narrow area of professional discourse or procedural system that touches only a small segment of society. The Law Is a White Dog will prove valuable for anyone who seeks a comprehensive, critical understanding of our society and the role played in it by the law." --Law Library Journal
"A cumulative masterpiece of probing, relevant erudition. . . . More concerned with conceptual structures than local specifics, Dayan breaks rich new critical ground on the well-trodden path from plantation to prison. [A] stunningly insightful yet painstaking inquiry into the very real effects of the ongoing legal and cultural project of defining the boundaries of personhood." --American Literature
From the Inside Flap
"Colin Dayan's engagement with what she calls the sorcery of the law leads her to trouble narrative movements from ignorance to knowledge, animality to humanity, barbarism to enlightenment, slavery to freedom. In the process she urges us to recognize how legal technologies that once sustained a core contradiction of slavery--that slaves were only accorded legal personality when they committed a crime--now relegate millions of incarcerated persons to civil death. The Law is a White Dog compels us to acknowledge how the ghosts of slavery continue to animate institutions--from Guantanamo to the supermax--that thrive on racialized violence today."--Angela Y. Davis, professor emerita, University of California, Santa Cruz
"In language that is searing and lyrical, evocative and precise, this exceptional book thinks with the zombies, specters, felons, slaves, dogs, cadavers, and other entities that are the remnants of loss and dispossession in the law. Dogs and people are abundantly present here, even as the legal fictions they are made to inhabit are exposed with acid lucidity. These are hard histories made readable by Dayan's precious acts of writing."--Donna J. Haraway, author of When Species Meet
"This is truly an extraordinary book, one which will become a classic of interdisciplinary legal scholarship. Combining memoir, literary criticism, history, cultural studies, and analysis of legal doctrine, this is a fascinating tour de force."--Austin Sarat, Amherst College
host of plenitude. What is the meaning of the portable green screen, first put up by the narrator so that he can command as if a disembodied voice, and then removed, leaving
Bartleby the motionless occupant of a room? In this time of unrelenting taxonomies, when persons became things—either perishables in the market or fi xtures on land—
and where felons died in law but lived in fact, Bartleby stands at the limit screen or chancel of these categories, destabilizing the defi nitions crucial not only to property in slaves but to the regulatory beneficence of civil society.