Dire, Médire, Dédire

The article analyzes the triviality of Austin’s version of everyday-world speech act theory (which explicitly excluded fictional uses of language) in favor of its specific value for investigation of fictionality, invoking ideas of Pierre Bourdieu and Émile Benveniste. Noting the thematic prominence in the Misanthrope of two of Austin’s favorite examples of speech acts, for marriage (“I do”) and courtroom testimony (“I swear to tell the truth . . . ”), the article examines the work’s dramatic ambiguities in relation to Austin’s theory—and in particular, its shortcomings. Molière thus articulates the profoundly divided nature of Alceste indicated by Donneau de Visé (“ridicule”/“juste”), Rousseau (“un homme droit, sincère, estimable,” but also facing the world as “un personnage ridicule”), and recently by Georges Forestier and Claude Bourqui (the melancholic, jealous lover vs. the philosophe misanthrope, the world champion of sincerity), permanently at war with himself, in a war he is bound to lose. The article concludes that Molière constructs much of the famously conversational dramatic texture and indeterminate conclusion not through “successful” speech acts, but rather through failed ones; a reflection, too, of the rapidly transforming social values of the play’s historical moment.

Mapping Law and Performance

In the past decade or so, there has been a substantial body of work in law and humanities in which “performance” serves as a key word, an umbrella term for a highly diverse set of inquiries: the examination of trials as theater, courtroom testimony, improvisatory judicial interpretation, embodied cognition, “acoustic jurisprudence,” adversarial agonism, physiognomic credibility, video representation, symbolic “speech,” police encounters, terrorism, the production of legal identities, and more. This chapter explores the meaning of “performance” in such studies, and recounts the author’s attempts to map the terrain: to identify the separate kinds of inquiry that make up the study of law and performance; to offer a taxonomic overview of the whole. It describes the challenges the author encountered in attempting to do so, and what these reveal of the issues facing the study of law and performance. The last section reflects on some of the risks of interdisciplinary study generally, and the potential benefits that might accrue to law and performance if it resists becoming a “field” and remains, instead, a contingent conjunction.

Torture and African American Courtroom Testimony

Chapter two focuses on the Dave Canty case and the Daniels-Robinson case. The two cases shows how allegations of torture were dealt with during criminal proceedings and examines the means used by African American suspects to substantiate allegations of torture during their trials. Overall, this chapter examines the testimonies of African American defendants and the degree to which their statements were recognized by the courts of the South.

Aspirational Descent and the Creation of Family Lore: Race Shifting in the Northeast

This article builds on work examining how hundreds of thousands of white French descendants in the northeastern part of the continent have been shifting into “Indigenous” identities in the past two decades or so. The first part of the paper explains the workings of “aspirational descent,” that is, when a French woman from the 1600s is turned into an “Indigenous” ancestor for the purpose of claiming indigeneity in the present. The second part of the paper explores the creation of “family lore” by several French descendants using aspirational descent in courtroom testimony. Overall, the author illustrates how stories about long-ago Indigenous ancestry in white settler families, such as that of Elizabeth Warren, often involve creative interpretations of childhood stories that rely on the logic of elimination inherent to settler colonialism.

Testimonial Incapacity and Criminal Defendants in the South

highlights the tensions between the demands of modern law and white supremacy by studying the rights of convicted criminals in court. Many southern states, for racial and partisan ends, used criminal convictions to strip convicts of their right to testify on their own behalf in court. While states in the rest of the country had revoked such limitations on courtroom testimony by the late nineteenth century, southern states maintained them. They served as an extension of Jim Crow laws, used to deny African Americans full citizenship, much as felon disenfranchisement laws did.