Literature Program, Human Rights Program, and American and Indigenous Studies Program Present
The People's Court
Thursday, November 13, 2014
Olin Humanities, Room 205
Guest lecturer Bryan Wagner, Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power After Slavery (Harvard University Press, 2009).This lecture surveys the development of the police court in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Police courts were tribunals where mayors or court recorders resolved disputes and punished misdemeanants (including vagrants, prostitutes, and petty thieves) without recourse to formal jurisprudence. They were also sources of popular entertainment that attracted spectators who were engrossed not only by conflicts and confessions but also by the mechanics of the justice system. In this lecture, I am interested in the legal education that audiences took away from these tribunals, or in how they came to know law as theater, as prerogative, and as process. The municipal records produced by the police courts were sparse, when they were kept at all, but we have access to a rich secondary archive of sources -- satirical newspaper columns and cartoons, mock-epic poems and theatrical set-pieces, vaudeville recordings and sheet music, radio transcriptions, and courtroom anecdotes collected as folklore -- that permit us to reconstruct these proceedings in substantial and lurid detail.
Free and open to the public.
For more information, call 845-758-7284, or e-mail [email protected].
Location: Olin Humanities, Room 205