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Vagrant Figures: Law, Labor, and Refusal in the Eighteenth- Century Atlantic World

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Vagrant Figures: Law, Labor, and Refusal in the Eighteenth- Century Atlantic World University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2014 Vagrant Figures: Law, Labor, and Refusal in the Eighteenth- Century Atlantic World Sarah Nicolazzo University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the American Literature Commons, Comparative Literature Commons, Literature in English, British Isles Commons, and the Literature in English, North America Commons Recommended Citation Nicolazzo, Sarah, "Vagrant Figures: Law, Labor, and Refusal in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World" (2014). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 1386. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1386 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1386 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Vagrant Figures: Law, Labor, and Refusal in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World Abstract The archive of vagrancy is a counter-history of economic rationality. In seeking to catalogue and apprehend the non-laboring body, vagrancy law theorizes labor by tracking its refusal. While vagrancy laws had existed in England since the fourteenth century, vagrancy takes on new meaning in the eighteenth century, as labor becomes central to economic theories of value, emergent penitentiary institutions promote work as a mode of criminal rehabilitation, and transatlantic debates over slavery lend new urgency to the problem of defining "free labor." When legal, economic, and literary texts invoke vagrancy, they therefore ask a crucial question for this period: what makes people work? Vagrancy law called on its enforcers to interpret and predict the actions of those who (in the words of many eighteenth- century statutes) could give no good account of themselves. Across a wide variety of genres, vagrancy appears not as an identity, but as a proliferation of figures, a picaresque parataxis that links characteristics and behaviors as signs of a common disposition yet refuses identitarian coherence. By figuring social threat as unpredictable mobility, ambiguity, and incoherence, the rhetoric of vagrancy justified an equally expansive mobility and flexibility for police power. By bringing together texts debating crime and poverty in England, the meaning of "free labor" in the context of slavery in the Caribbean, and the stakes of mobility in the United States, "Vagrant Figures" reveals how vagrancy linked police power to economic rationality across transnational circuits of commerce, legal thought, and colonial governance. As economic reasoning informed the management of colonies and the imaginative apprehension of the global, vagrancy came to signify threat to the global enterprises of capitalism and colonial expansion. At the same time, however, the power of vagrancy's rhetoric became a resource for authors seeking to challenge or critique police power. Through readings of authors including Jane Barker, Henry Fielding, Charles Brockden Brown, Edward Long,William Earle, Karl Marx, and Adam Smith, this project traces the resolutely figurative workings of political economy and police power in the long eighteenth century, as both theorized human perception and interiority through registers of the imaginative and rhetorical. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Comparative Literature and Literary Theory First Advisor Suvir Kaul Keywords Empire, Labor, Police, Political Economy, Vagrancy Subject Categories American Literature | Comparative Literature | Literature in English, British Isles | Literature in English, North America This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1386 VAGRANT FIGURES: LAW, LABOR, AND REFUSAL IN THE EIGHTEENTH- CENTURY ATLANTIC WORLD Sarah Nicolazzo A DISSERTATION in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2014 Supervisor of Dissertation Graduate Group Chairperson __________________________ __________________________ Suvir Kaul Kevin M. F. Platt A. M. Rosenthal Professor of English Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures Dissertation Committee Michael Gamer, Associate Professor of English David Kazanjian, Associate Professor of English Chi-ming Yang, Associate Professor of English ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This is the best part. Out of a genre that typically occludes its own collaborative nature, acknowledgements offer a space for intimacy and collectivity to erupt. As my students learn, writing is a difficult and messy business, but writing these acknowledgements has been pure pleasure. My parents, Claire Stairiker and Michael Nicolazzo, have always encouraged my eccentricity, my obsessions, my bookishness, stubbornness, and anger—all excellent qualities for a scholar. While this project is about the more sinister aspects of imagining a figure whose form cannot be known in advance, they raised me with the benevolent version of this disposition, never trying to stop me from being a surprise to them—or to myself. And George Hoessel has, literally from my birth, been a part of the family, teaching me about queer kinship years before I had the capacity to understand how radical those lessons had been all along. The Barnard College Writing Center continues to shape who I am as a writer and teacher, and I cannot imagine doing what I do without drawing on the lessons I learned there. This project was made possible through the financial support of a Benjamin Franklin Fellowship from the University of Pennsylvania and a Dissertation Fellowship from the Josephine de Karman Foundation. I also want to thank the organizers of GET-UP, the graduate student union that fought for university recognition just before I arrived at Penn. They were never recognized, and didn't exist any longer during my time here, but were instrumental in improving fellowship support for Penn students, so they are to thank for the fact that I received a living wage for my five years of funding at Penn. JoAnne Dubil, the administrative coordinator for Comparative Literature, should run the world. If she did, I am convinced that all resources would be distributed equitably and compassionately, with impeccable organization and good humor. I thank my committee—Suvir Kaul, Chi-ming Yang, Michael Gamer, and David Kazanjian—for their generous rigor, their curiosity, and their careful reading of many, many drafts. Chi-ming Yang is to thank for pushing me to understand how centrally this project must be about race and empire, and she has been my role model when I imagine what eighteenth-century studies can and ought to become. Michael Gamer has always shared his expansive knowledge and curiosity without hesitation. Without him as an interlocutor, I may not have stumbled upon my own capacity to be fascinated by eighteenth-century economic thought. Thanks to David Kazanjian, I am now proud and humbled to be part of a genealogy of scholars trained to "say yes to the text." This lesson has contributed more than perhaps any other to my intellectual maturity: intimate, sympathetic engagement with every text is what has made this dissertation what it is, methodologically, and I look forward to teaching the "three yeses" to a new generation. iii For six years now, Suvir Kaul has been asking me tough questions, pushing me to reconsider every assumption, and helping me hone my writing to its sharpest. His commitment to the analysis of power is as present in his advising as it is in his scholarship, as he has shown the same concern for my working conditions and funding as he has for my readings of eighteenth-century texts. He has pushed me towards precision ("'Weird' is not a category of analysis!") and encouraged me to embrace, unapologetically, the presentist commitments that animate my scholarship ("Your great strength is that you have an old-fashioned concern with the material conditions of things!") I can only hope to emulate his perfect balance of unabashed polemic with genuine openness to views that challenge his own. His teaching is everywhere in this project—and not just in those moments when I begin a sentence with "Indeed." Toni Bowers has been an engaged reader of my work since my arrival at Penn. She helped introduce me to the field of eighteenth-century studies, both intellectually and professionally, and I am grateful for her work in demystifying the institutional histories and rhetorical forms that too often go unspoken. My first publication is quite indebted to her encouragement, critique, and dedicated reading of many drafts. And of course, she is responsible for my permanent obsession with Clarissa, which has certainly enriched my life, even if it has also meant that my friends have had to hear much more about Samuel Richardson than they likely ever wanted to, or indeed, thought was possible. Many faculty members at Penn, especially Tsitsi Jaji, Heather Love, Emily Steinlight, and Peter Stallybrass, have informed my thinking through insights shared generously and informally. Though we do not know each other personally, this work could not have happened without an earlier generation of scholars who transformed the field of eighteenth-century studies into a field I actually wanted to enter. Thank you, therefore, to Laura Brown, Janet Todd, Felicity Nussbaum, Betty Joseph, Srinivas Aravamudan, and Susan Lanser.
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