Blackness has transcended the form of Western IPR that the Affirmative has invested itself into—the very foundation of IPR is gridded in the slaves relation to whiteness.

My thinking about private property – as cultural metaphor and as abstract value determining and governing scales of existence – is also informed by scholarship on ownership and property in American and African American literature (Best, Fugitive; Clymer; Homestead; King, Race, Theft; Luck; Schneck) as well as by interventions from the scholarly field of law and literature (Coombe; Dolin). Flowering as a movement systematically investigating the correlation between the law and literature since the 1980s (Dolin 1), thinkers working in this context have since pointed to the “narrativity” of the law and its textual articulations (Brooks and Gerwitz; Rose) and have discussed this in relation to issues such as literary property rights, intellectual property rights, copyright, and constitutional rights (Buinicki; Ely; Hesse; Irr). Commenting on the importance of the politics of form for the domain of property and its various configurations in American law, Best in The Fugitive’s Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession suggests that the interplay between slave law and intellectual property law “help[s] redefine the very essence of property in nineteenth-century America” (16). Following Best, the conceptual correlations between property and personhood established under slavery continue to live “within the text of the law” and they do so within the specific frame of the emergence of intellectual property law towards the end of the nineteenth century (14).

We read: The issues of personhood and property that slavery elaborates and the issues from the emerging law on intellectual property are part of a fundamental historical continuity in the life of the United States in which the idea of personhood is increasingly subject to the domain of property. Slavery is not simply an antebellum institution that the United States has surpassed but a particular historical form of an ongoing crisis involving the subjection of personhood to property. (Fugitive 16) 1.4 Private Property as Cultural Metaphor and Literary Form 17 Best’s analytical focus on slavery jurisprudence and intellectual property law configures a new ensemble of questions concerning “the social specificity of the person-property relation as the law tries to come to terms with new configurations of that relation and, in turn, generates new forms for that relation” (16).

As mentioned earlier, it points to what Best has called the “agency of form.” What follows is an attempt at taking up Best’s concerns regarding form in my analyses of the relation between property and personhood and the critique of this relation as presented in A Mercy. 1.5 Situating the Study Unruly Narrative is located at the interdisciplinary intersections of the scholarly fields of Early American Studies, African American Studies, U.S.-American Black (Diaspora) Studies, Black Feminist Criticism and Theorizing, as well as Critical Race Theory. It is a study that draws extensively on post-slavery theoretical trajectories (including recent US Black feminist articulations and Afropessimism)¹⁷ invested in criticizing and dismantling white Western modernity’s structural and epistemological histories and legacies of slavery and racial subjection. The study approaches Black Studies as an intellectual project equipped with an analytic lens that attempts to account for Blackness in an antiblack world, both in terms of structure and performativity (Sexton, “African American” 10). As such, Black Studies operates as a fundamental corrective and as an insurgent project of counter-epistemology to European and Western Enlightenment’s narrative of universal subjectivity.¹⁸

While Black Studies certainly can be understood as Black intramural critical conversation about the status and stakes of Black existence, articulation, and critique (Spillers, “Idea,” Black), it also represents an important intervention into white knowledge productions and long-standing  Christina Sharpe defines the term ’post-slavery’ as follows: “[W]hile all modern subjects are post-slavery subjects fully constituted by the discursive codes of slavery and post-slavery, postslavery subjectivity is largely borne by and readable on the (New World) black subject” (Monstrous 3).

I borrow the term here to delineate these articulations specifically (see also Chapter 3).  In general, Black Studies have labored to push a critical “transformation of the human into a heuristic model [over and against the idea of the human as] an ontological fait accompli” (Weheliye, “After Man” 322). Weheliye reminds us that Black Studies in North America has “existed since the eighteenth century as a set of intellectual traditions and liberation struggles that have borne witness to the production