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101 Colum. L. Rev. 640 (2001)
Beyond Black and White: Cultural Approaches to Race and Slavery

handle is hein.journals/clr101 and id is 678 raw text is: ESSAY BEYOND BLACK AND WHITE: CULTURAL APPROACHES TO RACE AND SLAVERY Ariela Gross* This Essay surveys the new field of cultural-legal history, highlighting its promise and pitfalls for the study of race and slavery. It discusses several aspects of the new cultural approaches: the view of trials as narratives or performances; the emphasis on the agency of outsiders to the law, including people of color and white women; and a household approach to slavery and other domestic relations. The Essay argues that these studies have begun to transform historians' understandings of old debates regarding the origins and nature of American slavery, the beginnings of Jim Crow, and the pos- sibilities of resistance against white cultural hegemony. While there are dan- gers to the new cultural approaches, in particular the loss of an all-encom- passing framework to understand law, race and slavery, and the limitations of a black-white model, cultural-legal history also holds great promise for re- thinking the role of law in racial formation, the nature of legal change, and the relationship between law and extralegal norms. INTRODUCTION When I was a graduate student trying to pursue studies in both U.S. history and law, I was keenly aware of the institutional and intellectual divide that prevailed between social and legal history. Time after time, professors asked me to choose whether I would be using legal records to study society or studying the history of law (which could have no possi- ble interest to students of society). As I became interested in race and slavery, I found that there was a deep gulf between the cultural and legal histories of the subjects.' Histories of African-American culture, and * Associate Professor of Law, University of Southern California Law School. Many thanks to Scott Altman, Jody Armour, Edward Ayers, Alex Capron, Mary Dudziak, Karen Dunn-Haley, Robert Gordon, Leslie Harris, Walter Johnson, Greg Keating, Wendy Lynch, Renee Romano, Hilary Schor, Nomi Stolzenberg, Wendy Wall, and participants in faculty workshops at USC Law School and UVA Law School for reading and commenting on drafts of this Essay, and to Stephanie Fleischman for research assistance. Special thanks to Laura Edwards for her insightful commentary on a portion of this Essay at the Porter L. Fortune Symposium on Slavery at the University of Mississippi, and to Winthrop Jordan for inspiration. 1. Slavery studies, unlike many areas of U.S. history, have not depended heavily on legal records to give a window into ordinary people's lives. Since the 1970s, colonial and women's historians have been using county and local court records to talk about marriage and family, crime, patterns of property ownership, and class relations, to name a few topics. For examples in women's history, see, e.g., Norma Basch, In the Eyes of the Law: Women, Marriage, and Property in Nineteenth-Century New York (1982); Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (1980); Suzanne 640

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