"Black thinkers in the antebellum United States grappled with what it meant to inhabit a place, a history, and a violent legal regime. In newspapers and pamphlets, political speeches, and fiction, Black writers persistently imagined alternative and liberatory legal futures. In reading these writers as architects of legal possibility, Faith Barter mobilizes the coincidental intimacy of prose and the legal term pro se, which refers to litigants who represent themselves in court. The book studies multiple literary genres—short stories, novels, freedom narratives, speeches, confessions, periodicals, and pamphlets—alongside legal historical treatises, trial transcripts, judicial opinions, and statutes."

"This collection brings together the experiences and voices of anthropologists whose engaged work with im/ migrant communities pushes the boundaries of ethnography toward a feminist, care-based, decolonial mode of ethnographic engagement called ‘accompaniment.’ Accompaniment as anthropological research and praxis troubles the boundaries of researcher-participant, scholaractivist, and academic-community to explicitly address issues of power, inequality, and the broader social purpose of the work. More than two dozen contributors show how accompaniment is not merely a mode of knowledge production but an ethical commitment that calls researchers to action in solidarity with those whose lives we seek to understand."