Criminal genius in African American and US literature, 1793-1845

How did creative genius develop in tandem with the criminalization of Blackness in the early United States?

In Criminal Genius in African American and US Literature, 1793-1845, Erin Forbes uncovers a model of racialized, collective agency in American literature and culture. Identifying creative genius in the figure of the convict, the zombie, the outlaw, the insurgent, and the fugitive, Forbes deepens our understanding of the historical relationship between criminality and Blackness and reestablishes the importance of the aesthetic in early African American literature.

Demonstrating that racialization and criminalization are historically entwined processes, Forbes focuses on cases where criminal matters are-or seem to be-outside the law, and where the possibility of reparation lies instead in the aesthetic realm. Racialized criminality predated, and helped to shape, the structure of legal enslavement: it impacted Black Americans from colonial to US labor camps, to debt bondage and the penitentiary, and ultimately to violent policing and systemic mass incarceration. Along the way, these very systems of racialized criminalization also generated fugitive, creative possibilities that challenged white supremacist regimes.

Drawing on original archival research to map alternative constellations of agency across a range of cultural geographies-such as Philadelphia's 1793 yellow fever epidemic, New England crime periodicals, Black Atlantic political philosophy, the poetics of insurgency, and the maroon aesthetics of the Great Dismal Swamp-Forbes shows how different forms of subjectivity, especially those associated with the criminal, the enslaved, and the nonhuman, challenge the boundedness of the legal subject. Revealing that agency was a deeply contested concept in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Criminal Genius offers new ways of reading dispossessed literary and historical figures back into the historical record.