Neither Fugitive nor Free

Expands the contours of African American writing and identity through meticulous reconstruction of eighteenth-and-nineteenth-century freedom suits. ~American Quarterly

In addition to providing a strong sense of the focal cases, Wong evinces a rare willingness to consider the ways these cases were reappropriated in larger antebellum legal processes and print culture. Wongs wonderfully relentless interdisciplinarity pushes her repeatedly to analyze not simply events, but the language and rhetoric surrounding them. Her command of published sources is impressive: she deftly weaves together scholarship on law, legal history, literary criticism, political history, social history, gender theory, and ethnic studies, and she rightly insists that her subjects cannot be fully understood without recovering a richer range of voices and texts. Perhaps most importantly, Wongs book joins calls to reconsider generic definitions of slave narratives and race literature and so begins to embody the potential for broader senses of black texts and black history. ~Journal of American History

A hidden face of abolitionism is revealed in Edlie L. Wong's, Fugitive nor Free, which examines freedom suits brought by black people or for them, mostly as a result of avisit to a free zone in which law was silent on slavery or in which law barred slavery. ~Early American Literature

Neither Fugitive nor Free's interdiciplinary and transatlantic approach usefully draws from literary criticism, critical race theory, legal history, and gender studies to provide sophisticated and revealing insights into Anglo-American understandings of and narratives about freedom and slavery. ~Brian Schoen, Common-Place

An original, powerful interdisciplinary approach to the political and legal struggles against slavery in the antebellum period. Wong’s transatlantic focus on the travel of enslaved persons, as fugitives or nominally free, goes far beyond well known slave narratives and gets to the heart of the contradictions of slavery in a liberal republic. ~Amy Kaplan,author of The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture