In an alternative reading, Karla F. C. Holloway's "Legal Fictions" (Duke University Press, 2014) suggests a different composition for the tradition and argues its contemporary vitality. Her thesis is that legally cognizable racial identities are sustained through constitutional or legislative act, and these nurture the "legal fiction" of African-American identity. "Legal Fictions" argues that the social imagination of race is expressly constituted in law and is expressively represented through the imaginative composition of literary fictions. As long as US law specifies a black body as "discrete and insular," it confers a cognizable legal status onto that body. US fictions use that legal identity to construct narratives — from neo-slave narratives to contemporary novels such as Walter Mosley's "The Man in My Basement" – that take constitutional fictions of race and their frames (contracts, property, and evidence) to compose the narratives that cohere the tradition.