Toward an abolitionist literary history of the police. Atlantic rogues -- The novel and the sexuality of vagrancy -- Lyric population and the prospects of police -- Settler vagrancy -- Surveillance and black life in Equiano's Atlantic -- Toward an abolitionist literary history of the police.
Summary:
"In this innovative book demonstrating the important role of eighteenth-century literary treatments of policing and vagrancy, Nicolazzo offers a prehistory of police legitimacy in a period that predates the establishment of the modern police force. She argues that narrative, textual, and rhetorical practices shaped not only police and legal activity of the period, but also public conceptions of police power. Her extensive research delves into law and literature on both sides of the Atlantic, tracking the centrality of vagrancy in establishing police power as a form of sovereignty crucial to settler colonialism, slavery, and racial capitalism. The first book in several generations to address policing and vagrancy in the eighteenth century, and the first in the field to center race and empire in its account of literary vagrancy,"-- Book jacket.
Series:
The Lewis Walpole series in eighteenth-century culture and history.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.