Beyond black and white: Cultural approaches to race and slavery

This Essay surveys the new field of cultural-legal history, highlighting it s promise and pitfalls for the study of race and slavery. It discusses seve ral aspects of the new cultural approaches: the view of trials as narrative s or performances; the emphasis on the agency of outsiders to the law, incl uding people of color and white women; and a household approach to slavery and other "domestic relations. " The Essay argues that these studies have b egun to transform historians' understandings of old debates regarding the o rigins and nature of American slavery, the beginnings of Jim Crow and the p ossibilities of resistance against white cultural hegemony. While there are dangers to the new cultural approaches, in particular the loss of an all-e ncompassing framework to understand law, race and slavery, and the limitati ons of a black-white model; cultural-legal history also holds great promise for rethinking the role of law in racial formation, the nature of legal ch ange, and the relationship between law and extralegal norms.