Vagrant Figures: Law, Literature, and the Origins of the Police by Sal Nicolazzo (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Vagrant Figures: Law, Literature, and the Origins of the Police by Sal Nicolazzo Kristina Huang Sal Nicolazzo, Vagrant Figures: Law, Literature, and the Origins of the Police ( New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2021). Pp. 320; 3 b/w illus. $65.00 cloth. Sal Nicolazzo's Vagrant Figures makes a case for how transatlantic systems of policing are not born out of historical inevitability; rather, these systems are connected to the durable and pliable category of vagrancy. Deftly and incisively, Nicolazzo reads across legal and literary genres to demonstrate the rhetorical force of vagrancy in the transatlantic eighteenth-century Anglophone world. The rhetorical force of vagrancy stems from its paratactic and anticipatory logic — "it attributes its object with future criminality, dependence, or danger as if these things had already happened" (18). The expansive but vague symbolic universe associated with vagrancy was co-constitutive with the development of policing. Throughout this impressive book, Nicolazzo advances an "avowedly political literary historicism as a self-reflexive method" (240) that can attune us to how social phenomena like vagrancy are not timeless facts; rather, such social phenomena are active traces of ideological frames, past and present, that render certain modes of governance, like the police, thinkable. Vagrant Figures is an illuminating literary-critical experimentation with the methods of Cultural Studies. The chapter analyses do not culminate in a straightforward, causal narrative as one might expect in a "prehistory of the modern administrative state" (33). The absence of a direct line from the past to the present is not a structural weakness but instead a result of the book's investment in developing a historical thinking that conjunctural analysis affords. To my mind, Nicolazzo's call for "a kind of perverse historicism" (240) is akin to Stuart Hall's call for "some kind of rough periodisation." In "Racism and Reaction" (1978), Hall describes this periodization as "holding two different perspectives in mind at the same time." This approach begins with studying the stages of a racism's development "sequentially" over a period of time, while analyzing "laterally" things that have been connected to the developing racism. Indeed, the oft-cited conclusion of Hall et al.'s Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (1978)—"race is the modality in which class is lived"—is echoed in the overarching theorization of Vagrant Figures: "Race is the modality in which primitive accumulation lived" (30). While the book's chapter analyses carry out a conjunctural analysis from an eighteenth-century perspective, Nicolazzo also layers on a theorization of historical thinking through queer studies' debates around temporality. [End Page 120] Nicolazzo demonstrates across a wide range of texts that vagrancy was (and remains) an ideological "catchall" (3) and "a racializing category" (29). The first three chapters periodize vagrancy in stages, contextualizing the aesthetic history shared between policing and vagrancy. Together, these chapters emphasize how vagrancy was not a matter of identity or subjectivity formation; rather, vagrancy was made through legislative and literary practices of spectacularizing surplus populations and rationalizing the management of these populations. The English Rogue (1665), seventeenth-century writings about plantations in the Caribbean, and the Vagrancy Act of 1714 illustrate the ways that aesthetic pleasure and policing were enmeshed: "digressive, episodic, unpredictable adventures" in the picaresque form mirrored "the parataxis at the heart of vagrancy law" (66, 68). The way that the lumpenproletariat was imagined—figured in paratactic, heterogeneous, multitudinous, and spectacular terms—became the means to articulate different perceptions of threats and disorder. Chapter 2 turns to Henry Fielding's The Female Husband (1746), Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall (1762), and Mary Saxby's Memoirs of a Female Vagrant (1806) to shift attention from the family unit towards the parish's central role in managing terms of subsistence, welfare, and local responsibility. These terms effect gendered and sexed rubrics of surveillance that underpin the "governmentality of social reproduction" (100). Eighteenth-century vagrancy's relationship to the parish offers an important valence to queer studies by providing a "model of deviance that does not depend on identitarian coherence," and one that moves "outside traditional accounts of the domestic sphere and its subjects" (115). This chapter might be productively read alongside the coda...