Description
Book SynopsisPatricia Williams is a lawyer and a professor of commercial law, the great-great-granddaughter of a slave and a white southern lawyer. The Alchemy of Race and Rights is an eloquent autobiographical essay in which the author reflects on the intersection of race, gender, and class.
Trade ReviewWilliams is an original and imaginative mind, an unstultified, insubordinate thinker who jumps off cliffs and lands on her feet, who flies close to the sun and never melts her wings. She accomplishes the near impossible: simultaneous depth of engagement in law and world. The alchemical forge she theorizes between race and rights parallels her own method: ‘the making of something out of nothing.’ See what she makes out of sausage, polar bears, Beethoven. See if you can ever shop at Benetton’s again. -- Catharine A. MacKinnon, University of Michigan Law School
One of the most invitingly personal, even vulnerable, books I’ve read… Williams has a knack for keeping you just a bit off balance… Her readings invigorate familiar controversies: If you thought there was nothing new to be said about Howard Beach or Eleanor Bumpurs, Tawana Brawley or Baby M., read Williams on them. But some of the most magical turns of argument flow from far less public events… The law needs a brain…and, even more, a heart and some courage. Certificates won’t help. This book just might. -- Henry Louis Gates, Jr. * The Nation *
Williams melds sophisticated legal scholarship, memoir and allegory into a rich melange that will change perceptions about the substance and spirit of black women… At a time when the nation is wrestling with political correctness or wrongness…Williams’ candor about the law and her life is refreshing…
The Alchemy of Race and Rights brings jurisprudence to the people while leaving no doubt that the author is among the finest legal talents among us. -- Evelyn C. White * San Francisco Chronicle *
This is a work where style and substance are deeply connected… Writers of feminist jurisprudence first pushed the door open wide some fifteen years ago, and many scholars of color have walked through. Williams’ work is among the best, and the most respected, in this tradition… There is passion in these essays, and there is rage, clarity, confusion, intelligence and tenderness. This is more than the alchemy of race and rights. This is the magic and complexity of life. -- Judy Scales-Trent * Women’s Review of Books *
Table of ContentsPART I: Excluding Voices: A Necklace of Thoughts on the Ideology of Style 1. The Brass Ring and the Deep Blue Sea 2. Gilded Lilies and Liberal Guilt 3. The Death of the Profane PART II: Trial by Text: A Sequence of Sublimation 4. Teleology on the Rocks 5. Crimes Without Passion 6. The Obliging Shell PART III: Ladder to the Light: A Series of Hinged Turning Points 7. Fire and Ice 8. The Pain of Word Bondage 9. Mirrors and Windows PART IV: The Incorruptible Simplicity of Being: A String of Crystalline Paroles 10. Owning the Self in a Disowned World 11. Arm's-Length Intimacies 12. On Being the Object of Property Notes A Word on Categories Acknowledgments Index
