Race and Forensic Science in American Literature, 1894-1959

FAIN: HB-251297-17

Rachel Kathleen Watson
Howard University (Washington, DC 20059-0001)

A book-length study of the relationship between race and forensic science in American crime fiction by Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Rudolph Fisher, Richard Wright, and Chester Himes, 1890s-1950s.

Capturing the Individual argues that in crime fiction of the segregation era, forensic science takes an unexpected turn—one of undercutting the ideology of inequality that animated Jim Crow. Located in the body but independent from and even contrary to the typifying ideology of race, the “biological individual” posited by forensics ran counter to theories of black criminality and essentialist race science by depending instead upon notions of a biological equality. This book project claims that through forensic preoccupations in the crime novels of Mark Twain, Rudolph Fisher, Richard Wright, William Faulkner, and Chester Himes the humanity of the black individual is not only asserted through sentiment and psychology, but is, more radically, marked as a fact already “self-evident”—a forensic certainty that “speaks for itself.”

Associated Products

“Parent to Mockingbird: Harper Lee and a Novel Deferred" (Article)
Title: “Parent to Mockingbird: Harper Lee and a Novel Deferred"
Author: Rachel K Watson
Abstract: This essay considers the relationship between Harper Lee’s first unpublished manuscript and her subsequent novel, and makes the original argument Mockingbird must be read as a lesser compromise of the political aims she made evident in her first attempt at a novel, the more potentially progressive (but abandoned) manuscript Go Set a Watchman. The essay shows how a proper understanding of the relationship between the two books offers insights into inequalities of race and class that are still relevant today.
Year: 2018
Primary URL: http://post45.research.yale.edu/2018/06/parent-to-mockingbird-harper-lee-and-a-novel-deferred
Primary URL Description: Post45:Peer-Reviewed
Secondary URL: http://http://post45.research.yale.edu
Secondary URL Description: Post45:Peer-Reviewed
Access Model: open access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Post45
Publisher: Post45:Peer-Reviewed

"Herself But Black": Richard Wright, Flannery O’Connor, and the 'Near Enemy' of Civil Rights (Book Section)
Title: "Herself But Black": Richard Wright, Flannery O’Connor, and the 'Near Enemy' of Civil Rights
Author: Rachel K Watson
Editor: Alison Arant and Jordan Cover
Abstract: “The ‘Near Enemy’ of Equality: Richard Wright, Flannery O’Connor, and Cold War Civil Rights,” included in a collection on author Flannery O’Connor forthcoming from University Press of Mississippi, offers a new and bracing alignment between the aims of authors Flannery O’Connor and Richard Wright, in the context of racial and economic politics during the early years of the Civil Rights Movement. This is the first scholarly work to consider these authors as having resonant aims, both in terms of their fiction’s progressive political commitments, and regarding the “Christ-haunted” view of human rights they share.
Year: 2018
Primary URL: http://www.upress.state.ms.us/category/literature/upcoming
Primary URL Description: forthcoming
Secondary URL: forthcoming
Secondary URL Description: forthcoming
Access Model: book
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Book Title: Reconsidering Flannery O'Connor
ISBN: forthcoming

“‘It’s no real pleasure in life’: Motiveless Crime and the Literary Imagination of Jim Crow” (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: “‘It’s no real pleasure in life’: Motiveless Crime and the Literary Imagination of Jim Crow”
Author: Rachel K Watson
Abstract: This paper considers how the figure of “motiveless” crime appeared in the work of certain mid-century southern writers, and in the work of non-southern writers interested in the racial violence of the Jim Crow south. In the staging of "true crime" stories by writers as diversely oriented as Gwendolyn Brooks, Eudora Welty, Truman Capote, Richard Wright, and Flannery O’Connor, we see a shared interest in capturing a kind of “criminal evidence” not admissible, or relevant, in the courts: the kind of psychological material that made coherent motive finally impossible to identify, thus asserting literature as an important form of "evidence" in its own right. This paper suggests that such depictions dramatize anxieties regarding punishment and justice in the context of an un-Constitutional regime, as well as concerns regarding the perceived threat of totalitarianism more broadly and paradoxes inherent to the figure of the abstracted individual posed by certain mid-century “procedural” liberalisms.
Date: 02/14/2018
Primary URL: http://https://www.asle.org/calls-for-papers/society-study-southern-literature-biennial-conference/
Primary URL Description: South By and By: Society for the Study of Southern Literature Biennial Conference
Conference Name: South By and By: Society for the Study of Southern Literature Biennial Conference

“‘Blood taken from his veins’: Self-Incrimination and the Limits of Personhood.” (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: “‘Blood taken from his veins’: Self-Incrimination and the Limits of Personhood.”
Author: Rachel K Watson
Abstract: In Holt v. United States (1910), Justice Holmes established a formal distinction between the evidence of the voice and the evidence of the body, marking the Supreme Court’s adoption of the Fifth Amendment as a privilege regarding testimonial evidence only. But by the 1950s, developments in police procedure, crossed with due process decisions of the Warren Court, provoked new deliberations on doctrinally held Cartesian distinctions between the mind and the body: that is, between registers according to which a legal person may be taken by the police as a voluntary source of their own “evidence.” In Rochin v California (1952), Justices Black and Douglas extended the privilege of the Fifth Amendment by invoking the bodily boundaries implied by the Fourth, to include: “words taken from his lips, capsules taken from his stomach, blood taken from his veins.” But 13 years later, in Schmerber v. California (1966), Justice Brennan would again limit the scope of the Fifth Amendment protection to “testimonial evidence,” explicitly excluding all forms of “physical” evidence from the protection against self-incrimination: blood, fingerprints, voice and handwriting samples, and standing in a line-up. The decision split the Court 5-4, with each dissent (including that of Chief Justice Warren) citing due process concerns raised by allowing the forcible extraction of evidence from the body as excluded from the right to protection from self-incrimination. This paper considers the stakes of such juridical distinctions in the context of how American writers dramatized resonant relations of power between the state and the individual throughout a period that put intense pressure on the limits of police power and the integrity of the body: that of de jure and de facto racial segregation. Texts to be considered include Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground (1941), William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun (1950), and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960).
Date: 03/16/2018
Primary URL: http://http://lawculturehumanities.com/past-conferences/
Primary URL Description: ASSOCIATION FOR THE STUDY OF LAW, CULTURE, AND THE HUMANITIES TWENTY-FIRST ANNUAL CONFERENCE
Conference Name: ASSOCIATION FOR THE STUDY OF LAW, CULTURE, AND THE HUMANITIES TWENTY-FIRST ANNUAL CONFERENCE

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