The Fiction of Chester Himes

Rosanna Cavallaro, Suffolk University Law School, has published "Chester Himes' Cotton Comes to Harlem: A Reparations Parable", in volume 19 of Law and Literature. Here is the abstract.

This paper locates the fiction of Chester Himes within the literary traditions of classic and, later, hard-boiled detective fiction, and examines Himes's departures from established narrative forms in order to elucidate the legal and political ideology of race and crime that he enacts in them. I demonstrate that, in his representation of crime and punishment in his 1965 novel COTTON COMES TO HARLEM, Himes repudiates formal systems of retributive justice, while simultaneously endorsing an ad hoc regime of restitution that prefigures, by metaphorically enacting, the economic reparation of African Americans for injuries inflicted during their slave past.

Download the entire paper from SSRN here.