Night, Law, and the Obscene Enjoyment of Interracial Violence

This article examines some meanings and experiences of night and darkness for American legal history and political theory, in an effort to think anew about the ongoing history of interracial violence. I address political republicanism as a scheme of visibility, posing the political problem of darkness that was manifest in the patrolling of the enslaved, and the significance of sadistic pleasure that it reveals. I query Chris Tomlins’ account of Nat Turner’s massacre of 1831, demonstrating that darkness and pleasure create a parallel avenue to the Lacanian real that motivates Tomlins’ method of speculative history.