| Abstrakt: |
This essay examines an unusual entry in a late eighteenth-century prison register of the Berkshire County Gaol. The column labeled "crime" tells us that a person named "Deliverance Jason" was jailed "for want of surety for her good behavior." While Deliverance's "crime" has legal precedent, understanding its implications requires contextualization and analysis. The essay proceeds in a fashion inspired by Saidiya Hartman's method of "critical fabulation." With a praxis of curiosity and care, it connects findings from the penal log to historiography and social theory on the early American republic, early prison, indigent transiency, slavery, and emancipatory religious politics. It draws from feminist, Afropessimist, womanist, and religious historical scholarship to elaborate the worlds in which Deliverance may have lived. It joins conversation with postcolonial critiques of the archive to interrogate the ethics of searching for Deliverance and her "crime" at all. The essay demonstrates that while the early encoding of crime may have supported the social entrapment of Deliverance, her entry reveals instabilities as well. In fact, the case of Deliverance Jason suggests ways that she herself may have confounded local authorities' attempts to "fix" her—legally, racially, sexually, geographically, and even temporally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
