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UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Identified, Misidentified, and Disidentified: Subject Formation and Reformation in American Law and Literature Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0ns9n146 Author Perez, Aurelio Jose Publication Date 2010 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Identified, Misidentified, and Disidentified: Subject Formation and Reformation in American Law and Literature By Aurelio José Pérez A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in Charge: Abdul R. JanMohamed, Chair Hertha D. Sweet Wong Waldo E. Martin, Jr. Spring 2010 1 Abstract The Relationship of Newspaper Articles to Modern Culture by Aurelio José Pérez Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Berkeley Professor Abdul JanMohamed, Chair In this dissertation, I examine legal definitions of race within the United States and the representation and reformulation of these categories within U.S. literature. The substrate of this dissertation is a collection of American literary and legal texts from the 17th through the 20th centuries. I examine how these texts chronicle, represent, and often intentionally misrepresent individuals’ attempts to subvert and even openly challenge delimited identifications such as ‘immigrant’ or ‘slave.’ Often these challenges are leveled against the normative identificatory organ of ‘Law,’ that is, the judicial processes and legal decisions that establish and confirm these reductive identifications. The mode of the challenges I examine is movement, or literal mobility. When normative pathways of identification begin to fail, mobility gains importance as a means of transgressing, figuratively and literally, usually impermeable classificatory boundaries. The idea of mutable identity is almost a truism of modern Western thought. Less appreciated, however, is the connection between identity and location, and more pertinently, the coordination between movement and identity. This coordination is the first focus of my dissertation. In order to understand these identifications and mobile re-identifications, this dissertation examines the sets of conditions – historical, social, biological, and especially legal – that seek rigidly to classify individuals as well as the sets of conditions that enable mobile re- identification. Phrased in another way: this dissertation explores both the possibilities of literal transgression of identificatory boundaries as well as the execution of such transgressions. Alongside literary chronicles of these transgressions, I analyze a variety of legal texts that have promulgated and structured reductive methodologies of identification. Whether negotiating slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, or post-WWII immigration politics, the examined literary texts are distinctly concerned not only with the tensions of identity, but the manners in which mobility or transit can enable self-determination through re-identification. Conversely, the examined legal texts display the formulation and repeated revision of criteria of reductive identifications chronicled in the examined literature. The power of law to establish interpretive methodologies that reductively identify individuals is the second focus of my dissertation. i ACKNOWLEDGMENTS To my family – you are the best of who I am and the source of my motivation. To my friends – for the blessing of your company and the wisdom of your counsel. To my teachers – for the challenges and the encouragement. Finally, I would like to thank entities whose generous financial support has enabled my studies. Swarthmore College The Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program The Institute for Recruitment of Teachers The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation The Max Kade Foundation The Social Science Research Council The University of California, Berkeley To all of you, I extend my deepest gratitude. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS IDENTIFIED, MISIDENTIFIED, AND DISIDENTIFIED: SUBJECT FORMATION AND REFORMATION IN AMERICAN LAW AND LITERATURE ............................................................................................. iii CHAPTER I: FICTIONS OF LAW AND CUSTOM: IDENTIFICATION STRATEGIES IN MARK TWAIN’S PUDD’NHEAD WILSON, PEOPLE V. JENNINGS, AND BEYOND ...........................................................1 CHAPTER II: INDIVIDUAL INDETERMINACY AND LEGAL DETERMINATION: RACIAL IDENTITY IN DOE V. LOUISIANA AND WILLIAM FAULKNER’S LIGHT IN AUGUST.................................................70 CHAPTER III: WITH PRETENSE TO NEITHER THE OBJECTIVITY OF LAW NOR THE SUBJECTIVITY OF LITERATURE: A CONSIDERATION OF INDENTIFICATORY HERMENEUTICS IN JAMAICA KINCAID’S LUCY AND U.S. IMMIGRATION LAW ..........................................................................................121 CONCLUSION ...........................................................................................................................166 iii IDENTIFIED, MISIDENTIFIED, AND DISIDENTIFIED: SUBJECT FORMATION AND REFORMATION IN AMERICAN LAW AND LITERATURE I. AN INTRODUCTORY EXAMPLE In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Harriet Jacobs recounts the struggles she faces in surviving and escaping slavery.1 Unable to escape the South, yet unwilling to remain a slave, Harriet Jacobs chooses to hide in the garret of her grandmother’s house. The garret in which Harriet Jacobs remains is too small for her – during her interment Jacobs is unable to stand up or enjoy fresh air or sunlight. 2 More challenging to Jacobs than the space of the confinement, however, is its duration. Jacob remains in the nook above her grandmother’s house for seven years, barely alive, socially dead, neither slave nor free.3 This incredible ability to remain entombed, as well as Jacobs’ movement into other spaces, allows her to effect her own social and biological revivification. By challenging her oppression through an act of self-interment, Jacobs subverts her ostensible ‘master’ Dr. Flint and challenges her status as a slave. This relocation into a space unknown to and thus uncontrolled by the oppressive power structures of slavery initiates a crucial moment of re-identification for Harriet Jacobs; as she risks her life in a manner symbolically tantamount to living death, she simultaneously creates a possibility for a symbolic rebirth into a less delimited identity. This movement into the garret and other movements by Jacobs are all attempts to surmount her social, symbolic, and juridical identification as a slave through movement. But the act, or these acts, of mobile-reidentification within Harriet Jacobs’ autobiography are even more powerful because they simultaneously support Harriet Jacobs’ project of literary re- identification. Written by an African-American woman in the slow build up to the Civil War, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was an attempt to demonstrate to Northerners the terrors and iniquities of slavery and the humanity of those suffering under slavery’s yolk. In this sense, Harriet Jacobs’ publication is a literary exploration of slavery that establishes an identity for Harriet Jacobs that is foreclosed to her by law. It hardly requires mention that under contemporary law Harriet Jacobs was a ‘slave’ – or, more accurately – a fugitive slave. Deprived of basic rights, Harriet Jacobs is caught within the reductive legal identification of ‘slave.’ This reductive legal identification is self-contained: Harriet Jacobs cannot enter a court to challenge her status as a slave. Indeed, law even forbids Jacobs from attaining the education that might help her make this challenge. 1 HARRIET A. JACOBS, INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL, WRITTEN BY HERSELF (Jean Fagan Yellin, ed., (2000) 1861). 2 Id. at 114. (“The garret was only nine feet long and seven wide. The highest part was three feet high, and sloped down abruptly to the loose board floor.”) See also, Illustrations, id. at 238 (showing a scale reproduction of Jacobs’ hiding place). Id. at 114. (“There was no admission for either light or air.”) 3 The property of African Americans – enslaved or free – was often subject to the whims of the white individuals who controlled the South. Indeed, what does it mean for a woman of color to “own” property when that property is subject to regular search or violation by white individuals? Thus, while Harriet Jacobs’ grandmother was free and owned her house, her ability to possess her home was always limited by her ability to control the boundaries of her home. Jacobs’ grandmother maintained this control only to the degree white individuals of her society ceded it. A recognition of the conflicted status of ‘property,’ whether Jacobs’ body or her grandmother’s house, parallels Jacobs’ entrance into literature. In the mid-19th century the written page was a location or property that was owned by whites but occasionally granted to African Americans. Thus, Jacobs’ occupation of the garret functions similarly to her occupation of the page. iv Against the limitations placed on Jacobs by law are the possibilities opened up to her in literature. By recounting her story, Harriet Jacobs can attack slavery and humanize herself. In sum, Jacobs’ project of re-identification comes through both the life she reveals to the reader as well as Jacobs’ act of writing that life. This coordination between space, identity, and mobility and the tension between law