Policing Intimacy: Law, Sexuality, and the Color Line in Twentieth-Century Hemispheric American Literature

Jenna Grace Sciuto

ISBN 10: 1496833457 / ISBN 13: 9781496833457

Published by University Press of Mississippi, 2021

About this Item

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: Policing Intimacy: Law, Sexuality, and the Color Line in Twentieth-Century Hemispheric American Literature
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Publication Date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1496833457
• ISBN 13: 9781496833457
• Binding: Paperback / softback
• Condition: New
• Weight: 375 grams

About this title

Synopsis

In Policing Intimacy: Law, Sexuality, and the Color Line in Twentieth-Century Hemispheric American Literature, author Jenna Grace Sciuto analyzes literary depictions of sexual polic-ing of the color line across multiple spaces with diverse colonial histories: Mississippi through William Faulkner’s work, Louisiana through Ernest Gaines’s novels, Haiti through the work of Marie Chauvet and Edwidge Danticat, and the Dominican Republic through writing by Julia Al-varez, Junot Díaz, and Nelly Rosario. This literature exposes the continuing coloniality that links depictions of US democracy with Caribbean dictatorships in the twentieth century, revealing a set of interrelated features characterizing the transformation of colonial forms of racial and sexual control into neocolonial reconfigurations.

A result of systemic inequality and large-scale historical events, the patterns explored herein reveal the ways in which private rela-tions can reflect national occurrences and the intimate can be brought under public scrutiny. Acknowledging the widespread effects of racial and sexual policing that persist in current legal, economic, and political infrastructures across the circum-Caribbean can in turn bring to light permutations of resistance to the violent discriminations of the status quo. By drawing on colo-nial documents, such as early law systems like the 1685 French Code Noir instated in Haiti, the 1724 Code Noir in Louisiana, and the 1865 Black Code in Mississippi, in tandem with examples from twentieth-century literature, Policing Intimacy humanizes the effects of legal histo-ries and leaves space for local particularities. By focusing on literary texts and variances in form and aesthetics, Sciuto demonstrates the necessity of incorporating multiple stories, histories, and traumas into accounts of the past.

About the Author

Jenna Grace Sciuto is professor of English at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. Her work examines the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in US and global literatures. She is author of Policing Intimacy: Law, Sexuality, and the Color Line in Twentieth-Century Hemispheric American Literature, published by University Press of Mississippi.