Review
"In addition to providing a strong sense of the focal cases, Wong evinces a rare willingness to consider the ways these cases were reappropriated in larger antebellum legal processes and print culture. Wong's wonderfully relentless interdisciplinarity pushes her repeatedly to analyze not simply events, but the language and rhetoric surrounding them. Her command of published sources is impressive: she deftly weaves together scholarship on law, legal history, literary criticism, political history, social history, gender theory, and ethnic studies, and she rightly insists that her subjects cannot be fully understood without recovering a richer range of voices and texts. Perhaps most importantly, Wong's book joins calls to reconsider generic definitions of slave narratives and race literature and so begins to embody the potential for broader senses of black texts and black history." -The Journal of American History,
"Each of the chapters is organized around a landmark legal case, but the author complements this information with valuable information from pamphlets, magazines, casebooks, and newspaper articles, a "loose genre of antislavery literature" (p.7) that sought to discuss the implications of territorialized freedom.The study of this literature also allows the author to recover the voices and experiences of slaves otherwise absent from historical records...
Neither Fugitive nor Free makes important contributions to several bodies of scholarship, notably to legal studies of slavery in an Atlantic context. Scholars of legal history, slavery, travel, and abolitionism in the Atlantic will profit from this volume."-American Historical Review,
#8220;Expands the contours of African American writing and identity through meticulous reconstruction of eighteenth-and-nineteenth-century freedom suits”
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American Quarterly,
"Neither Fugitive nor Free's interdiciplinary and transatlantic approach usefully draws from literary criticism, critical race theory, legal history, and gender studies to provide sophisticated and revealing insights into Anglo-American understandings of and narratives about freedom and slavery."
-Brian Schoen,
Common-Place
"A hidden face of abolitionism is revealed in Edlie L. Wong's, Fugitive nor Free, which examines freedom suits brought by black people or for them, mostly as a result of a visit to a free zone in which law was silent on slavery or in which law barred slavery."
-,Early American Literature
About the Author
Edlie L. Wong is an Assistant Professor of English at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick where she teaches nineteenth-century African American and American literature.
