The Oregon Humanities Center presents a Wine Chat with Faith Barter: ”Incantation: The Power of Legal Language and Black Feminist Imagination”

Afro-Canadian poet and scholar M. NourbeSe Philip has written that “Law and poetry both share an inexorable concern with language—the ‘right’ use of the ‘right’ words, phrases, or even marks of punctuation; precision of expression is the goal shared by both.” In fact, this shared concern is often incantatory: it has the power to call worlds into being, by using mere words to induce shared beliefs and actions. Historically, legal systems have wielded this power in notoriously violent and anti-Black ways. And yet, Black writers have long experimented with legal writing’s worldmaking potential as a possible site of freedom practice. 

At her Wine Chat, Faith Barter will trace the surprising common ground between legal language and Black feminist fiction and poetry, examining its historical roots as well as its contemporary implications in texts like Ketanji Brown Jackson’s recent dissenting opinion in Trump v. CASA.

Barter is an associate professor of Black Studies and English at the University of Oregon. She is author of Black Pro Se: Authorship and the Limits of Law in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature (2025). Organized around four legal forms—appeal, confession, jurisdiction, and precedent—the book demonstrates how Black writers creatively used them to challenge the logics of their oppression. Reading Black writers not merely as witnesses or victims but as visionaries for what the legal system could be, the book excavates the importance of legal thinking in the African American literary tradition.

The Wine Chat is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be provided. Beverages are available for purchase, and a food cart is on the premises of Capitello Wines. There is ample parking at Banner Bank across the street.