The Humanities and Public Life by Brooks Peter;Jewett Hilary;

Author:Brooks, Peter;Jewett, Hilary;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press

F-Clef

Ultimately, this jurisprudential enterprise is centered on what it means to be a person in the eyes of the law—albeit in the figurative eyes of a blind goddess. The germ of this thematic is the Three-Fifths Compromise found in Article I of the Constitution, which apportioned representation by “adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.” By virtue of the institution of slavery, the interrogation of personhood is thus necessarily concerned with race, but the rhetoric of the Constitution broadly engages conceptions of living subjects, legal persons, nonpersons, and personified things.

Perhaps it has always been thus, but the bounds of personhood are being redistricted according to invisible new rules. Americans fear they are in decline, losing ground. We all feel it because these are not the economic times they used to be, but the danger looms that some of us are treating rights as a zero sum game so that whites are being swallowed up by nonwhites, patriarchal order ruined by slovenly, unfaithful women, and money speaks louder than words.12

And … that hoodies, like burqas, have evolved in this moment of American culture as sites of anxiety and secrecy, as ciphers for honor and betrayal. They provide shelter from hostile gaze yet also the titillation of erotic revelation. They provide a curtain against the world yet speak simultaneously of oppression and indictment and taboo. They chart a tremulous line between person and personification, class and class warfare, animus and eros, between lives constrained by excessive overseeing and deaths made visible by stoning.

So we confront the fluid subjectivity of relation between the visuals of Emmett Till’s destroyed, pieced-together body and the smooth, unmarked expanse of Trayvon Martin’s nearly intact corpse (but for the tiny efficiencies of bullet address). In either event, the epitaph memorializes a turf-war, a cheap defense of utterly worthless imaginary ground cast as a battle unto death.

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