Her new book only deepens my appreciation of the breadth of her scholarship, the probing and insightful nature of her analysis. Residues of Justice exemplifies the best in the new cultural studies. It brilliantly grounds traditional western understandings of the nature of justice in a detailed understanding of the history and culture in which those understandings took form and then problematizes all by counterposing legal theory to literary texts. Her counterposing of Beccaria and James Fenimore Cooper, Marx and Melville, Chomsky and Whitman is dazzling. Dimock focuses, however, on what remains unexhausted, unrecovered, and noncorresponding in the exercise of justice.
Justice can only be a partial answer to the phenomenon of human conflict.
She also examines an unusual configuration of nineteenth-century American authors, pairing figures such as Herman Melville and Rebecca Harding Davis, Walt Whitman and Susan Warner. The result is a book both passionate and scholarly. It invites us to rethink the meanings of literature, law, and philosophy, and to imagine a language of community more supple and more nuanced than the language of justice. Wai Chee Dimock is Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University.