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Full-Text Articles in Law
Langston Hughes: The Ethics Of Melancholy Citizenship, Robert L. Tsai
Langston Hughes: The Ethics Of Melancholy Citizenship, Robert L. Tsai
Robert L Tsai
As a body of work, the poetry of Langston Hughes presents a vision of how members of a political community ought to comport themselves, particularly when politics yield few tangible solutions to their problems. Confronted with human degradation and bitter disappointment, the best course of action may be to abide by the ethics of melancholy citizenship. A mournful disposition is associated with four democratic virtues: candor, pensiveness, fortitude, and self-abnegation. Together, these four characteristics lead us away from democratic heartbreak and toward political renewal. Hughes’s war-themed poems offer a richly layered example of melancholy ethics in action. They reveal how …
A Horrible Fascination: Segregation, Obscenity, & The Cultural Contingency Of Rights, Anders Walker
A Horrible Fascination: Segregation, Obscenity, & The Cultural Contingency Of Rights, Anders Walker
All Faculty Scholarship
Building on current interest in the regulation of child pornography, this article goes back to the 1950s, recovering a lost history of how southern segregationists used the battle against obscenity to counter the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Itself focused on the psychological development of children, Brown sparked a discursive backlash in the South focused on claims that the races possessed different cultures and that white children would be harmed joined a larger, regional campaign, a constitutional guerilla war mounted by moderates and extremists alike that swept onto cultural, First Amendment terrain even as the frontal …