ABSTRACT In his novel Pudd’nhead Wilson, set in the later antebellum period but written after Reconstruction, Mark Twain dramatizes the contradictions of the American racial hierarchy. In the story a light-skinned young man, born a slave but switched in the cradle with a free child, meets a tragic fate when his identity is revealed. The novel forms an unintentional bridge between the ancient Roman law of slavery, the foundation of much American slave law, and America’s contemporary ‘colourblind’ legal consensus, which coexists with a historically unprecedented, racially distorted system of mass incarceration. In ancient Rome, unlike the antebellum US, slaves carried no indelible visual markers of their status, and many were eventually freed. These conditions led to a great deal of legislation and litigation around status confusion, the legal matter at the heart of Pudd’nhead Wilson. A new form of status confusion exists in the US after emancipation; none are formally designated as slaves under the law, and race-based laws have supposedly been eliminated, and yet the law punishes the descendants of slaves en masse, in proportion to their pigmentation. This paper considers and compares these three circumstances of status confusion, toward the end of reasserting the central importance of race in the contemporary legal environment, and in white Americans’ civic fantasies.

中文翻译：

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罗马法院的密苏里州作家：普德黑德·威尔逊（Pudd'nhead Wilson），寓言为色盲帝国

摘要马克·吐温（Mark Twain）在他的小说《普德黑德·威尔逊》（Pudd'nhead Wilson）中创作，该小说在战前后期创作，但在重建之后写成。在这个故事中，一个皮肤白皙的年轻人，一个奴隶，但与一个自由的孩子一起摇篮，在暴露了自己的身份后，遭遇了悲惨的命运。小说在古罗马的奴隶制，许多美国奴隶法的基础和美国当代的“色盲”法律共识之间架起了无意的桥梁，后者与历史上前所未见，种族扭曲的大规模监禁制度并存。在古罗马，与美国的战前不同，奴隶没有携带不可磨灭的视觉标记，许多奴隶最终得以释放。这些情况导致了有关身份混淆的大量立法和诉讼，Pudd'nhead Wilson核心的法律事务。解放后，美国出现了一种新的身份混乱形式。根据法律，没有一个人被正式指定为奴隶，并且据称已经废除了基于种族的法律，但是该法律根据奴隶的构成对他们进行大规模惩罚。本文考虑并比较了身份混淆的这三种情况，在重新确认种族在当代法律环境和美国白人的公民幻想中的重要性之末。