Recently, a colleague described to me a colloquium that he had just attended. The subject was a draft paper written by one of the participants; the topic was the reception of newly freed African Americans into society during Reconstruction. Slightly bewildered, he reported that the paper appeared to argue that granting former slaves the legal right to marry was actually a bad thing—a way for the dominant culture to force its hegemonic institutions on a subject population and to impose racist and gendered legal norms on previously private consensual relationships. In fact, he said, the writer seemed to claim that the varied, fluid, “egalitarian” and “communal” sexual relationships among slaves rendered slave society superior—at least in this regard—to nineteenth-century white society.

On closer inspection, it turns out that the writer intended to join the critique of “rights-based strategies” on behalf of “abject groups,” the point being that the effort to gain inclusion in the dominant institutions of society initiates regulation by a “bureaucratic juridical apparatus” which itself becomes an instrument of further subordination while generating inauthenticity and false consciousness. However, as my informant nervously recognized, an uncharitable reader—like myself, perhaps—could find in this argument a backhanded defense of slavery, about which I used to believe it was socially inappropriate to say anything good.

This is the world of legal academia. I tell you this story to show that I, too, can participate in the scholarship of narrative that has come to dominate my craft. I, too, can