Freedom's bonds: Reconfiguring formal freedom in antebellum U.S. law and literature, 1820--1860
Bibliographic record
Abstract
"Freedom's Bonds" is a project about the aesthetic liveliness of legal formal freedom in the antebellum United States. The center of the project is the idea of legal formal freedom, a phrase that I use to indicate the conceptual criteria through which antebellum law formally recognized a subject as being free. I isolate four of these criteria in my project. In the antebellum United States, a legally free subject had the ability to form contracts, was a sovereign entity, was in possession of rights, and had the ability to associate with others to advance common interests. Contract, Sovereignty, Rights, and Association thus compose the keywords that anchor each chapter's exploration of the aesthetic dimensions of legal formal freedom. Of course, Native and African American people, among others, were purposefully denied legal freedom during the period I study, most obviously through the legally sanctioned operations of chattel slavery and Native dispossession. While taking these failures of the law into account, this project queries the nature and modes by which antebellum writers of color interacted with a legal system that overwhelmingly did not view them as subjects of lawful freedom. "Freedom's Bonds" contends that aesthetics offers a democratized mode of engagement with the period's racially circumscribed notions of legal formal freedom. As a discipline, aesthetics is often linked to notions of elitist, specialized discourses of good taste and refined artistic sensibilities. However, “ Freedom's Bonds ” seeks to trace an alternative genealogy of the aesthetic as a democratic method that is rooted in people's ability to make sense of law's abstract policies through the shared human capacity of sense perception.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".