In Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power After Slavery, Assistant Professor of English Brian Wagner rereads the archive of black vernacular expression in relation to the genealogy of American law, beginning with the system of police measures put into place by the British. Far from impeding black expression, Wagner argues, criminalization provided its perspective. Disturbing the Peace tells an alternative history of the archive in order to show how the black vernacular “bends the law’s words.” Within a legal framework that denied their capacity to speak, black singers and storytellers generated a voice and a place for themselves. Wagner studies well-known stories and songs in order to highlight their foundation in the law. As such, these texts resist the status of folklore to which they have long been consigned. Stories of apocryphal origin, mistaken identity, missed connections, false memories, phantom limbs, and dead men walking communicate more urgently the legal status of blackness, be it invisibility or threat.