| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Fugitive's Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession. By Stephen M. Best. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. xii, 362 pp. Cloth, $69.00, ISBN 0-226-04433-5. Paper, $25.00, ISBN 0-226-04434-3.)
Stephen M. Best has written an extended meditation on the relationship of slavery, intellectual property, and the legal framework of market economies that bolster the commodification of personhood. A work of literary criticism, the book seeks to foster new ways of seeing the "semiotics of property" (p. 36).	1
As persons, slaves are potentially an errant form of property that must be recaptured using such legal instruments as the Fugitive Slave acts. With mechanical reproduction of images and the introduction of the phonograph in 1877, voice and image might also escape from a tangible form and become exchangeable commodities. Proposed in 1890, right to privacy was transformed from protecting the inviolability of private space to mid-twentieth-century rights of publicity, allowing commercial exploitation of intangible aspects of personality.	2
Best calls the relationship between slavery and intellectual property "an uneasy alliance" (p. 53). In one particularly intriguing chapter, he describes Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) as a response to the Fugitive Slave Act. While Stowe saw slavery as a system resting upon the indolence of slaveholders, who only were roused as their property ran away, she herself pursued an important copyright action against errant unauthorized translations of her book.	. . .

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