Black Pro Se: Authorship and the Limits of Law in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature
Faith Barter
University of North Carolina Press
Black thinkers in the antebellum United States grappled with what it meant to inhabit a place, a history, and a violent legal regime. In newspapers and pamphlets, political speeches, and fiction, Black writers persistently imagined alternative and liberatory legal futures.
In reading these writers as architects of legal possibility, Faith Barter mobilizes the coincidental intimacy of prose and the legal term pro se, which refers to litigants who represent themselves in court.
Barter juxtaposes nineteenth-century law and literature to show how Black writers counterintuitively used legal forms to reimagine their own relationships to time and place.