In the Shadow of the Gallows: Race, Crime, and American Civic Identity by Jeannine Marie DeLombard (review)

In the Shadow of the Gallows: Race, Crime, and American Civic Identity, by Jeannine Marie DeLombard, seeks to “complicate African American literature’s creation story,” not by revising the canon but by focusing on the black persona in “black crime ephemera” (38). Speeches at Execution Day rituals, printed confessions, travel literature, Federalist #54, legal treatises, and works by Melville, Stowe, and Poe are just a few examples of the objects of DeLombard’s analysis. Many, if not most, of these discourses were not written by black authors, which underscores DeLombard’s point about needing to move beyond the first-person slave narrative as the genesis of the black persona in literature. DeLombard draws our attention to black crime ephemera because of the variety (and frequency) with which blackness is treated and, even more, because of the interpolation of blacks as citizens within these discourses.

The book comprises an introduction, section 1 (two chapters), section 2 (four chapters), and a conclusion. With the notes, bibliography, index, and acknowledgments added, the book has a total of 446 pages. The introduction serves as a microcosm of what the book seeks to accomplish rather than a précis for the rest of the book. DeLombard’s introduction allows the reader to become immersed in the discourse and her critical vantage toward it. One benefit of this approach is if one could not assign the entire book in a graduate seminar—and this is not a book accessible for most undergraduate students—then the introduction could be assigned and very few loose ends would be left dangling for the reader. A downside to this approach is the possibility for a reader to lack the clearest sense of what each chapter uniquely offers and how these chapters interact with one another. This minor quibble, however, does not detract from the analysis that follows.

Section 1 (chapters 1 and 2) situates crime ephemera in two contexts. Chapter 1, entitled “Contracting Guilt: Mixed Character, Civil Slavery, and the Social Compact,” offers a rich analysis of the paradox of black citizenship. The paradox is bound in the mixed character of slaves—they are not citizens under the law until they commit a crime, at which point they are treated as citizens due to their participation in the civic apparatus of the law. DeLombard states as the purpose of chapter 1: “This chapter commences the literary critical reorientation from constitutional to criminal constructions of black personhood and political belonging—from questions of rights to those of responsibility—by demonstrating how one of the nation’s guiding civic myths, that of the social compact, worked productively at cross-purposes with the legal fiction of the slave’s mixed character” (54). As many readers might notice, there is a lot going on in this sentence. DeLombard gives us much to think about and many concepts to manage as this chapter progresses. (Sentences like this occur frequently throughout the book, causing a mix of intrigue with the content and frustration with morass of concepts being strung together.) Throughout chapter 1, DeLombard moves across texts and eras to establish how slaves were legally constructed as noncitizens but rhetorically constituted as citizens when crime was involved. DeLombard explores the place of slavery within the social compact through the eighteenth-century writings of Montesquieu, Emmanuel Kant, William Blackstone, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, St. John Tucker, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Wilson. Drawing from Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault, DeLombard argues that the black persona was constituted by an “inclusive exclusion” of the enslaved.

The key text of analysis in chapter 2, “Black Catalogues: Crime, Print, and the Rise of the Black Self,” is a broadside entitled The Life, and Dying Speech of Arthur, a Negro Man. Now given legal status as a criminal, “Arthur” (if it was truly Arthur speaking) is given legal and rhetorical...