DeLombard, "In the Shadow of the Gallows"

We somehow missed this 2012 release from the University of Pennsylvania Press: In the Shadow of the Gallows: Race, Crime, and American Civic Identity, by Jeannine Marie DeLombard (University of Toronto). Here's the Press's description:

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 Crèvecoeur, 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.

A few blurbs:

"In her exquisitely written In the Shadow of the Gallows, Jeannine DeLombard reads early American criminal law in conjunction with the idea of social contract to illustrate the intricacies of political belonging from the early Republic through the antebellum period. Through the double helix of print and legal history, she chronicles the metamorphic role of authorship in African Americans' bids for enfranchisement against the backdrop of a nation entangled in contradictory definitions of personhood and property and of criminality and civility. Exemplary of humanities scholarship at its best, the book establishes the connections between American literature and the African American struggle for civic inclusion."—Priscilla Wald, Duke University

"I have long thought that DeLombard is at the absolute top of the scholars working on law and literature in North America, and In the Shadow of the Gallows confirms her status."—Alfred Brophy, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

For more information, including the TOC, follow the link.