| Writing over a century and a half ago of the challenges confronting the young American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville posited a central role for legal professionals in the prevention of majoritarian tyranny. In his classic work, Democracy in America, Tocqueville observes that in America "the language of the law...becomes, in some measure, a vulgar tongue," while "the spirit of the law, which is produced in the schools and the courts of justice, gradually penetrates beyond their walls into the bosom of society." With these comments, Tocqueville anticipates the contemporary field of law and literature scholarship, particularly that strain concerned with the relationship between legal discourse (a term that encompasses both the language and institutions of law), literary texts, and identity-formation at the individual and national levels. Positioned within such a critical tradition, this dissertation explores the connections between widely-disseminated legal models of identity and the autobiographical acts of Native American and African American writers between the Revolution and the early Twentieth Century. Reading works by writers such as Samson Occom, William Apess, Charles Eastman, William Wells Brown, Frederick Douglass, and Booker T. Washington against the historical background of American colonialism, I draw attention to similarities in their processes of self-definition. At the same time, by developing a new method for law and literature scholarship rooted in linguistic theories of performativity, I challenge the conventional dichotomization of ethnic American literatures around concepts such as assimilation or becomes, in some subversion. This approach rejects the normative, essentialist models of racial identity that have plagued much post-colonial criticism. Instead, I offer a rigorously historical discussion of the way race has functioned as a fluid signifier in the autobiographical careers of a number of Native American and African American writers. |
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