“Temporal Damage”: Pragmatism and Plessy in African American Novels, 1896–1902
“Temporal Damage”: Pragmatism and Plessy in African American Novels, 1896–1902
Oliver Wendell Holmes’s most famous pragmatist legal saying was that “the life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience.” I argue that Hopkins, Chesnutt and Dunbar published novels in the wake of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) that challenged American philosophical pragmatism by representing racially specific experiences of law and time.
Keywords: African American literature, Time, Timekeeping, Strategic anachronism, Strategic presentism, Citizenship, Justice, Political fictions, Legal history, Pragmatism
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