The electoral college’s provisions for contingent elections of the president and vice president blatantly violate political equality, directly disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Americans, have the potential to grossly misrepresent the wishes of the public, make the president dependent upon Congress, give a very few individuals extraordinary power to select the president, have the potential to select a president and vice president from different parties, and fail to deal with a tie for third in the electoral college. In addition, any resolution of a congressional choice of the president is likely to be tainted with charges of unsavory transactions. It is no wonder that even the most stalwart defenders of the electoral college choose to ignore contingent elections in their justifications of the system of electing the president.

Turning from communities of free people of color in Louisiana to New York City, Chapter 3, “Freedom’s Conduit: Spiritual Justice in ‘Theresa, A Haytien Tale’,” examines early African-American print culture, particularly the first African American short story, the anonymously authored “Theresa, A Haytean Tale” (1828). While Haitian Revolutionary histories in the US have often centered on Toussaint Louverture, “Theresa” follows the travails of a young woman and her all-female family in their struggle for Haitian independence. A cross-dressing spy against the French, Theresa frequently experiences visitations, possessions, and visions from God. Theresa’s political and spiritual labor forms a complex network of spiritual cosmologies and Haitian Revolutionary iconographies that help expand colonized understandings of gender and sexuality. In doing so, the tale reroutes the energy systems of both colonial plantation violence and early African-American domesticity by imagining a prophetic form of female futurity tied to Haitian independence, not biological reproduction. Ultimately, I argue, “Theresa” transforms the cult of Mary, showing how the female body serves as an instrument of divine energies in which the final product is not a child but instead political sovereignty.

Advanced age affected the performance of mastery, and some slavers saw the declining fortunes of another as providing them with the opportunity to rise at their expense. Concerns with – and contests over – the authority of aged enslavers did not end at their death. Wealth generated by slaveholding needed to be passed on, and the quest for profit and status that animated southern enslavers saw ferocious disputes erupt over the transferal of property between generations. Contests over wills and inheritance help reveal the complex and contested relations between enslavers, intergenerational tension in the American South, and shifting social hierarchies shaped by the passage of time. Antebellum enslavers prized the presumption of authority and craved respect from family, kin, and community. And yet, in legal challenges to wills, deeds, and bills of sale recorded posthumously, antebellum southerners revealed the disregard they held for aged enslavers’ claims of dominion, and their willingness to trash the reputation of fellow “masters” both before and after death.

Chapter 2 traces the historical development of mass tort litigation from the 1970s through the 1990s, documenting plaintiffs attorneys initial unsuccessful attempts in the 1990s to extend public nuisance theory to mass tort products and marketing litigation. During this initial foray into public nuisance theory, courts instead universally defaulted to a narrow view of nuisance grounded in property law. In cases involving tobacoo, asbestos, lead paint, and gun litigation courts declined to accept plaintiffs public nusiance claims, refusing invitations to expand a claim for public nuisance beyond its grounding in real property concepts. Courts contended that these mass tort harms sounded in causes of action for traditional products liability, not public nuisance, and that public nuisance law had never been applied to products cases. Courts noted the deleterious effects of accepting an expanded concept of public nuisance, which would allow any plaintiff to describe a harm from a lawful product as producing a public nuisance. Such a concept would invite unlimited liability for manufacturers of legal products.

Chapter 4 turns to an elucidation of a plaintiffs pleading burden in alledging a public nuisance claim. In modern 20th century jurisprudence, as defined by the ALI Restatement (Second) of Torts, a public nuisance claim involves four elements that a plaintiff must prove: (1) the defendants affirmative conduct (2) caused an unreasonabel interference (3) with a right common to the general public (4) this is abatable. The ALI Restatement (Second) public nuisance elements are derived from the common law extant at the time of drafting the restatement. Many states have codified these elements, or similar elements, in thier general public nuisance statutes. This chpater examines the competing ways in which courts have interprtede these elemts, particularly what constitutes a commonly held publci rigt. Courts also have diagreed concerning what constitutes an unreasonable interference with a public right. The chapter concludes with an exploration of of the judicial trend towards greater flexibility in defining public nusiance more expansively than the common law doctrine and statutory interpretations.

This chapter shows how enslavers were adept at assessing the temporal rhythms of the life cycle and adapting to the demands of embodied time in shaping their workforce. It shows how this flexibility stemmed from economic self-interest and a desire for dominance, and the severe cost of this for enslaved elders and the wider Black community. It first shows the types of jobs expected of elderly workers, and perceptions of managing a transition away from more active labors, before emphasizing how proslavery claims of a leisurely “retirement” for elders were rejected by the enslaved themselves. Enslaved elders could neither refuse nor deny the power of their enslavers to force them to continue their labors. Work, even if reduced, still had to be done upon pain of punishment, and enslaved people understood that the desire for profit that drove antebellum enslavers was enormously harmful to Black elders. As Lewis Clarke acidly recorded, “they hunt and drive them as long as there is any life in them.”

Old Age and American Slavery reveals how antebellum southerners adapted to, resisted, and failed to overcome changes associated with age, both real and imagined, and the extent to which these struggles intersected with wider concerns over control, exploitation, resistance, and survival in a slave society. In doing so, it asks future scholars to rethink static hierarchies among Black and white southerners, to incorporate age into their work as a category of analysis and as a relation of power, and to address the contingent and contested networks of solidarity and support among enslavers and enslaved in the American South. Age shaped slavery, both as a system of economic exploitation and a contested site of personal domination, in crucial ways. Albeit never on equal terms, both Black and white southerners had to grapple with the realization that “old age [was] creeping up on me so fast,” and their efforts to do so were entwined in the wider struggles within and against slavery. The ravages of time came for all, and the conclusion reiterates how recognition of this fact shaped the dynamics of American slavery, and the lives of enslaved people and enslavers alike.

This chapter examines Light in August and Absalom, Absalom! as Faulkner’s first novels to depict the racial ideology of the South as unstable and incoherent. Whereas the author initially attempted to understand how information continuously flows through a networked system as culture, these novels depict entropic states capable of undermining and destroying the social order. In Absalom, Absalom! especially, we see how regimes of power fail from within – with a network of individuals increasingly unable to relate to each other, so mediated are they by the ideological and racial abstractions of the plantation system. These emergent entropic states, though perilous to the wellbeing of many, are not simply to be feared. As ideological surfaces waver in their ability to disseminate cultural directives, there emerges the potential for reorganization and renewal, trajectories of novelty and behavior that gesture beyond the seemingly intractable bounds of social space and the self-reflexive epistemology of textual space that reinforces them.

The conclusion makes the case for Faulkner as an anti-ideological thinker, an artist engaged in attempting to disentangle image-making from propaganda as a key ingredient of his larger Yoknapatawpha project. I interpret Faulkner’s Stockholm Nobel address in this context, as a humanistic counter to modern disenchantment, an affirmation of human interiority in the face of scaling social systems in the process of becoming all-encompassing.