“THE WEB OF CIRCUMSTANCE”: CHESNUTT'TA ADALETSİZ YARGI DÜZENİ VE SUÇLULUK KARİNESİ ARACILIĞIYLA SİYAHLARIN İMTİYAZ MAHRUMİYETİ

Abstract

Charles Chesnutt's 1899 short story “The Web of Circumstance” criticizes the post-Reconstruction American South by demonstrating the unjust conviction and defamation of the main character Ben Davis. The 13th Amendment that abolished slavery becomes crucial to understand Ben's conviction for this amendment allowed white Americans to reenslave the black man, continuing to exploit the labor value of the black body after the abolition. In the story, Chesnutt utilizes themes of property acquisition, citizenship and incarceration to complicate the status of the black man's social elevation in post-Reconstruction South. The first part of this paper focuses on property acquisition as a form of success according to the late 19th century American economic values. As I analyze the importance of property for the freed black man to create an agency in the Reconstruction South, W.E.B. Du Bois, Cheryl Harris and Richard Brodhead will draw the theoretical framework behind the defamation of Ben Davis. The problematic property ownership of Ben Davis is analyzed with a focus on American judicial system and Du Bois' thoughts on the entitlement and the disenfranchisement of the black man after the Reconstruction. The second part of the paper concentrates on the presumed criminality of Ben Davis as a novel form of the black man's exclusion from social and financial elevation in the post-Reconstruction South. Foucault's ideas on the sovereign's authority to kill as well as how this complete sovereignty to obliterate the subject turns the person into the unmournable homo sacer of Agamben and Mbembe will be discussed in the second part in relation to Ben Davis. In the end, the systematic disenfranchisement of the black man in Chesnutt's story through hyper-criminalization will be demonstrated as an outcome of the unjust judicial system of the United States of America.