A Poetics of Perforation: Harriet Jacobs's Loophole and Black Feminist Insurgent Ground

-----

In Abolition Time: Grammars of Law, Poetics of Justice, Goldberg elaborates how a number of "legal grammars" delimit possibilities for conceptualizing and enacting "justice," which is distinct from "law." In this talk, Goldberg will draw on chapter of her book, which demonstrates how the colonial gender binary is itself a "grammar of law." The talk will read work by Harriet Jacobs, Hortense Spillers, C. Riley Snorton, and other theorists of racialized gender to offer an analysis of the legal principle "partus sequitur ventrem" before turning to contemporary abolitionist feminism. And in the final turn, Goldberg will build on Spillers's concept of "insurgent ground" to briefly outline their new book project, Deputy Citizenship: White Supremacy and the Privatization of State Violence.

-----