Law, Culture & the Humanities 2012: Panel on “Global Citizens: Violence and the Transnational Subject”

Posted: March 19, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: conferences | Tags: , , , , , | Leave a comment »

This past weekend in Fort Worth, TX, I was pleased to be part of the 2012 Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities. This year’s theme was “Representing Justice.” Tweets can be found at #ASLCH.

Audrey Golden, Nicolette Bruner, and I formed a law and literature panel called Global Citizens: Violence and the Transnational Subject, graciously chaired by Marc Roark of The Literary Table. Here are the paper abstracts:

Translating the ‘Self’ from Central and Eastern Europe: Putting Theory to Practice thought the Works of Aleksandar Hemon and W.G. Sebald by Audrey Golden

The second half of the twentieth century has borne witness to forced migration and statelessness in numbers previously unimaginable within modernity. Through the works of Aleksandar Hemon, a Bosnian-American émigré writer, and W.G. Sebald, a second-generation German novelist, this paper looks to the narratives of displaced persons and questions the role literary theory might play in imagining the processes of transnational movement and of internal “self-translation” that emigrants must undertake. This paper conceives a broader and more abstract model of “translation” that looks beyond natural language to include a cultural self-translation, and then asks if such a process is fraught with previously unimagined identity problems, or whether, although stemming from acts of violence, translating oneself might have ameliorative qualities for an individual caught between places, or in “nowhere” spaces.

Corporate Citizenship as U.S. Empire in Richard Harding Davis’s Soldiers of Fortune by Nicolette Bruner

Published in 1897, Richard Harding Davis’s novel, Soldiers of Fortune, describes the travails of a mining company that operates in the fictional Latin American country of Olancho, a thinly-veiled version of Cuba. The hero, filibustering engineer Robert Clay, facilitates the success of the corporation through military and financial interventions in Olancho. Meanwhile, Clay romances and marries Hope, the young daughter of the sole owner of the company’s stock. In this paper, I examine how Davis complicates the boundaries between corporate employer and human employee even as he glorifies the deeply unequal relation between U.S. corporations and the countries they exploited for profit. Corporate imperialism, as represented by the incursion of the U.S. citizen stockholder and his employees upon Latin American territory, becomes more than a matter of domination, but also an illustration of the complex interdependencies between business, storytelling, and violence in the fin de siècle.

Another Vietnam: War, The Archive, and the USS Kirk by Mai-Linh K. Hong

In late 2010, National Public Radio (NPR) aired a special series about the USS Kirk, a U.S. naval ship that was sent during the fall of Saigon to rescue the “remnants” of the South Vietnamese navy. The rescue was accomplished partly by transferring the Vietnamese ships’ sovereignty to the U.S. through a change of flags, a peaceful, quasi-legal transformation that dislodges the conventional Vietnam War narrative of violence and moral failure. Placing this “never before told” redemption story in the context of today’s U.S. war in Afghanistan, my project examines NPR’s historical revisionism and its production of a new visual iconography for the war that has haunted all later U.S. wars. I argue that, with “the archive” a site of suspense in the Wikileaks era, the rewriting of Vietnam must be understood as a response to contemporary anxieties about American imperialism, militarism, and national identity.

CFP: Spatial Perspectives: Literature and Architecture, 1850–Present

Posted: January 12, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: conferences | Leave a comment »

The following call for papers might interest our readers:

Spatial Perspectives: Literature and Architecture, 1850 – Present

FRIDAY 22ND JUNE 2012
UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD, FACULTY OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

This interdisciplinary conference seeks to foster a dialogue between literature and architecture by bringing together papers that encompass the diversity of thinking about these two disciplines and the ways in which they engage and interact. This will be one of the first conferences to examine the intersections of architecture and literature globally over a broad timeframe.

The conference is organised by Nicole Sierra (University of Oxford) and Terri Mullholland (University of Oxford). Contact us at: literature.architecture[at]gmail.com

More information may be found at the conference website.

Place, No-Place, and the Transnational Stage: “Minor” Works by Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams

Posted: December 9, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: reading & resources | Tags: , , | Leave a comment »

In his 1993 classic To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature, Eric J. Sundquist pays careful attention to texts many critics view as “minor,” such as Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition and Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson. As Sundquist reminds us, we miss much when we focus only on “major” works by canonical American writers, including, often, American literature’s insistent cultural heterogeneity and its fundamentally transnational character. It is in this light that I have been thinking about some plays I read recently.

In the 1940s, Tennessee Williams established his gift for rendering the local on stage: the characters and social dynamics he introduced in The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire continue to populate our imaginations when we think of the American South and New Orleans. His spatial metaphors still resonate: the streetcar that rushes us headlong through life; fragile characters trapped in a menagerie of societal constrictions. Written in the shadow of World War II, Williams’ highly successful family dramas might be seen (superficially) as reflecting a turn inward, a privileging of the domestic over the global at a moment of anxiety about America’s role abroad.

But Williams’ sense of place was more expansive than most remember. In Camino Real, first staged in 1953, Williams creates a surrealistic no-place that is alien yet familiar, fitting for this prescient allegory of American imperialism and state repression. In the first of sixteen “blocks,” Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, looking bedraggled, arrive in a Spanish-speaking town “that bears a confusing, but somehow harmonious, resemblance to such widely scattered ports as Tangiers, Havana, Veracruz, Casablanca, Shanghai, New Orleans.” After consulting a map, Sancho notes that the Camino Real (Anglicized) and the Camino Real (Spanish) meet in a dead end. Soon arrives the protagonist, an American named Kilroy who sports a jeweled belt spelling out “CHAMP” and a pair of golden boxing gloves. The audience follows Kilroy as he travels the Camino Real, encountering desperate characters of varying nationalities. In this play, unlike in Williams’ more well known works, tensions and contradictions within American society are projected vaguely outward onto the global stage (so to speak), resulting in a play filled with abstraction and symbols, rather than crystallizing into a concrete narrative of dysfunction in the domestic sphere.

Eugene O’Neill’s expressionist play The Emperor Jones, first staged in 1920, stands out as another allegory of empire and identity that has since been overshadowed by the playwright’s realist family dramas, which include Long Day’s Journey Into Night and The Iceman Cometh. Brutus Jones, an African American who speaks entirely in minstrel dialect, has made himself ruler of an unnamed Caribbean island, and now faces an uprising. He escapes into the forest, where he encounters a series of frightening, surreal scenes that reflect the traumatic history of race in America. Like Camino Real, this play also creates an unspecific foreign setting as a way to explore both the moral ambiguities of U.S. actions abroad and the deeply rooted conflicts that characterize American identity at home. Over the years, the play has been criticized for its racist imagery and characterization, but has also been interpreted by anti-racists as a cynical commentary on American race relations. It is a significant work insofar as it highlights the global or transnational aspects of American cultural history, particularly with respect to race.

from the outside

Posted: December 7, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: uncategorized | 1 Comment »

I’m stuck on the outside. I got my UNFCCC accreditation through the Association of American Geographers, and they didn’t get as many passes as they asked for, so some of us ended up with only one week’s worth of access to the conference center. One short week of contact groups, plenaries, ‘official’ side events, and what must have been the sweet life.

Once you are outside, the inside is unbearably attractive. There are outlets on the inside – not ever where you want them, but at least they do exist. There are permanent toilets on the inside. There are even negotiations on the inside.

Oh sure, there is plenty going on outside. Part of any COP is the people attempting to be visible on the outskirts – the civil society, the local municipalities, the international think tanks and the business community all meeting in their own constellations and explaining their worlds, largely to their own constituencies, but sometimes to Party delegates, the media, and opposite camps. C17, aka the People’s Space, aka the Alternative COP is happening up at the University of KwaZulu Natal, with speakers and events galore. (I’ve hit 50/50 with scheduled events actually taking place, though.) There is the South African “expo” just on the outside of the gates – flocks of young South African women in matching strapless dresses and colored belts selling Japanese technology as the answer (black dress, orange belt), Siemens technology as the answer (white dress, green belt), Sweden as the answer (I didn’t really understand what was going on there, but they wore white suits and champagne was flowing).  Yesterday I was at a fancy hotel for a side session on biofuels & trade measures – so there are even things happening that are related to my research.

Nonetheless, it’s hard to break out of feeling that none of this stuff matters – that what matters is what is happening on the inside. Of course, when I was on the inside, I wasn’t close to being inside enough – I couldn’t access most of the actual negotiating sessions. Even negotiators sometimes yearn to be more on the inside – the UNFCCC is notorious for ‘informal informal consultations’ in which small groups of select Parties meet to hammer out text and then present it to the rest of the Parties as a precariously balanced text that can’t be touched.

I’m not a political scientist – I’m not trying to predict future texts or discern political backroom maneuvers. I’m interested in a COP as a moment in time when a particular assemblage of actors momentarily comes together and presents a multi-faceted vision of the world – how it is, and how it could and should be. What tools, technologies and knowledges do they employ to sketch that picture? Which voices are heard and which are silent/ced? What types of legal, scientific, and moral vocabularies are drawn upon? Those are questions that can be asked from any number of different vantage points at a COP.

That said, it’s hard not to wish that my current vantage point was just a little more privileged. Which is probably what a lot of folk – not just at this COP – wish for too.

Updates:

Still one of my favorite organizations out there – Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, blogging from the COP: http://www.iatp.org/blog-climate-change

Climate change negotiations from the first week, as interpreted by UK youth with hand puppets:  http://youthdelegatemanitoba.wordpress.com/2011/12/06/catch-up-on-the-cop17-durban-climate-talks-in-less-than-2-minutes/

I’m an academi—hey, that looks interesting! Can I draft you a memo?

Posted: December 5, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Most of the past two + years I’ve been really pleased to be in academia, growing into my identity as a geographer. But sometimes I just…lose focus.

Here I am, a lone geography grad student at the UNFCCC COP. And it is huge, it is beyond the grasp of any one person. But I figured I’d follow my issue (biofuels) and see where it took me.

My search for biofuels has taken me to just about every one of the 150+ stands of organizations, endless side events and what negotiating contact groups I can get into (not many), and let me just say: everyone flipping says biofuels are a flipping mitigation measure for flipping climate change, but the UNFCCC process is not so much bringing out the biofuels.

So I’ve tried to be scholastically savvy…I’m interested in how science is used in framing the benefits, risks and uncertainties of biofuels in international negotiations, right? So I’ve looked for a parallel-ish issue within this COP, and I settled on CCS – Carbon Capture and Storage. Basic CCS idea: our main problem is that our energy sources produce too much carbon dioxide…so let’s pump it into the ground. There’s some empty space down in there, we’ve got the technology to do it, and it just so happens that we can actually use the process to flush out extra oil that’s otherwise hard to get out of exhausted wells (Enhanced Oil Recovery).

OPEC countries have been pushing hard for CCS to be included in the Clean Development Mechanism – in other words, for Annex 1 countries (“developed” countries minus US and soon Canada) to be able to offset their domestic carbon dioxide emissions by buying “credits” from non-Annex 1 countries (“developing” countries and the ‘project participants’ (companies, in this case)) for projects that reduce their emissions in some way. So for the immediate future, bringing CCS into CDM will mean paying oil companies to use a not insignificant amount of energy to store some carbon dioxide in the ground, and in the process enable them to extract an incredibly profitable amount of oil.

I wouldn’t say that I’m totally opposed to the basic concept of CCS. But in the past week I’ve heard enough from both the ‘con’ (Greenpeace and CDM Watch primarily) and ‘pro’ (University of Texas economic geology department, the Carbon Capture and Storage Association, etc) camps to feel that this is a technology that calls for precaution. (Turns out nothing raises my hackles quite like an overly confident and condescending economic geologist showing pictures of Perrier to illustrate that an accidental carbon dioxide release would be totally harmless.)

What can I say – I’m not impressed by arguments for rolling out a relatively new, rather large scale commercial technology that are based on ‘there’s absolutely no uncertainty or risk.’ And when pressed, it turns into ‘there’s absolutely no uncertainty or risk because we can choose the perfect geologic structures and monitor everything that happens.’ Right. Well, if that’s the case – and seeing as some of these countries are talking about sticking 40% of our emissions underground, hard to see how there are no uncertainties inherent in that – but even if that is the case, then we should probably make sure that site selection and impact assessments are incredibly robust and thorough, and that monitoring is required for a long long time.

Anyways, the point is, I spent a lot of last week going through draft texts and working with activists to draft language for press conferences and for friendly country delegations. What can I say – it felt natural…it’s what I used to do, it’s what I know how to do … but is it what I’m here to do?

There are other academics here who are unambiguously and stridently political (Professors Michael Dorsey (Dartmouth) and Patrick Bond (University of KwaZulu-Natal) being two outstanding examples). But from what I understand, they specifically study civil society. I don’t. At least, I don’t think that’s what I study.

Remind me again, what does an academic do?

The Mundanities of Negotiations

Posted: December 2, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: current events | Leave a comment »

I have a perfectly fine laptop that I purchased 2 1/2 years ago, and there are many environmental and human health reasons for using a piece of electronic equipment for its full lifetime, and that’s my plan.

But having an exhausted battery that lasts only an hour or so at a stretch presents a problem at a convention center where there are no outlets in any of the rooms where anything (negotiations, plenary, side event) happens. Which is my own problem, yes, and I should get a new battery, yes, but it turns out that I share this problem with a broad group of people. Most notably, many of the negotiators, but particularly those from “Least Developed Countries” (the ‘LDC Group’). Monday in the opening session of SBSTA, a representative of the Gambia was delivering the opening statement of the LDC Group with eloquence and clarity, until she suddenly paused and said “Oh sh*t.”

That’s right, her notebook’s battery had died on her. She proceeded to borrow her neighbor’s MacBook (I’m not sure if it was Georgia or Germany, but it definitely wasn’t the Gabon) and move her thumb drive over so she could continue reading the statement. In the middle of the whole process, with a room of thousands of people waiting, she quipped “Well, that’s how you know this is an LDC.” The whole room totally cracked up.

My battery is on the verge of dying right now, so I’ll make this short. In my experience, negotiations are mostly shaped by the overal geo-political state, individual domestic situations, business lobbies, domestic support and training for a negotiating team, and sometimes pressure from social movements, scientific bodies, and lawyers… but they are also shaped by which individuals are in the room at 4 am on Friday night, their blood sugar levels, their personalities, inter-personal dynamics…. And no doubt, these two weeks, by who in any given room has a laptop with a long-life battery and who does not.

Great Sources of What is Happening Politically and Technically:

http://climatenetwork.org/eco-newsletters – view of many civil society groups, but not all. Great articles directed specifically towards negotiators here in Durban – gets run off and passed out every morning.

http://www.iisd.ca/climate/cop17/ – IISD creates Environmental Negotiations Bulletin at all events like this, and they are priceless. For the policy wonks.

 

Legal Lacuna in Durban at UNFCCC COP 17

Posted: November 29, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: current events | Leave a comment »

Greetings from Durban!

My friend and colleague Mai-Linh Hong has been holding her own on Legal Lacuna for quite a while. (Thanks, Mai-Linh!) But how can one not blog from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations in Durban, South Africa? Herewith are a few thoughts from a lone geographer trying to study a mega-event of governance and spectacle.

These meetings are being referred to as “COP 17” because it is the 17th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (the States that have signed and ratified the treaty), but there are multiple meetings/negotiations happening at the same time. There is the main COP, but there is also the Conference of the Parties that are Members of the Kyoto Protocol (COP-MOP, or CMP) (ie, not the US, and, very soon, not Canada). There are a number of permanent “subsidiary bodies” within the COP, that are made up of representatives of all State Parties (States send politicians and ‘experts’): the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA) and Subsidiary Body on Implementation (SBI). There are also ‘ad hoc’ groups that have more acronyms and are extremely important. That said, I can only cover so much. I’m looking for where biofuels are brought into the negotiations and surrounding discussions (more on that as it comes up), and I’m focusing on the SBSTA meetings, scheduled to last through the first week.

One of the reasons I’m focusing on the SBSTA negotiations is that just two weeks ago I attended the week long negotiations of SBSTTA in Montreal, Quebec. Also pronounced “substa” – but this one is the Subsidiary Body for Scientific, Technical, and Technological Advice of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). The CBD is a ‘sister convention’ to the UNFCCC – along with the Convention on Combating Desertification, they were ‘born’ at the 1992 UN Rio Convention. The CBD acts as something of a baseline experience for me, because I was at the 10th COP in Japan last year and just recently at the 15th SBSTTA in Canada. There are a lot of differences between the CBD and the UNFCCC, which I’ll discuss more in the next few days.

But I thought a SBSTA meeting would be very similar to a SBSTTA – how much difference can one “T” make?

Well. I forgot that these SBSTA meetings are not a stand-alone, low-key affair – they are an integral part of COP17, and therefore these negotiations to provide ‘scientific and technological advice’ are deeply imbricated with all the negotiations happening right now – on the Kyoto Protocol, on whether there should be a mandate for a new legal instrument, etc etc etc. At least 20-30 times more observers were present at this first session of SBSTA than at the past CBD SBSTTA, and the State delegations certainly appeared to be politicians/negotiators rather than ‘experts’ (but I can’t confirm that).

And I should have known: UNFCCC is not known for transparency or access by observers/civil society to the negotiating processes. I happily showed up for the opening plenary meeting of the SBSTA Monday (Nov 28) afternoon, along with many other ‘observers’ (our section in the way back was packed out). After the initial statements from Party groups, the Chair announced that we would go through ‘administrative’ matters so that we could move on to substantive matters Tuesday morning. He then proceeded to run through the entire agenda, putting almost every agenda item into a Contact Group or an Informal Consultation, barely pausing for any statements, and discouraging discussion because it could be done in the side group.

No doubt, there is limited time here in Durban and a very heavy agenda. But from what I’ve seen at the CBD and here with the UNFCCC thus far, there are a number of important dynamics that follow from pushing all discussion into side negotiations:

- Language – In Plenary, there is simultaneous translation into the 6 UN languages. Side negotiations are uniformally conducted in English, with no translation. Tough cookies if you have a problem with that.

- Transparency – Observers are generally allowed to attend Plenary. Of the Contact Groups, generally the first and last negotiating sessions are open to observers, unless any Party objects (not uncommon). The Chair may allow observers in to the sessions in between or not, as they (and the Parties) see fit. Informal Consultations are never open to observers.

- Alternative Voices – In Plenary sessions, there is usually time for representatives of inter-governmental organizations, indigenous peoples, business, and civil society to make statements after Parties have made their interventions. At the UNFCCC, it seems that observer groups don’t have space to speak in the Contact Groups they are actually allowed into (at least not in the ones I’ve attended thus far). (As opposed to the CBD, where observers can speak in Contact Groups but their suggestions aren’t reflected in text without Party support). In the case of yesterday’s SBSTA, there was no time in the plenary for any observer statements. This means the SBSTA negotiations will now run for the week in these side groups, most likely entirely missing the constructive and disruptive statements of civil society.

As much as I acknowledge the cost constraints of any UN negotiations, I do wonder about the cost of shutting out voices of outsiders and even some Parties. How can we get the most robust agreements possible? More thoughts on this in the days to come…

Apologies for the length – apparently it’s hard to communicate the most basic points about the UNFCCC without going in to context and acronyms.

Check out:
http://www.mediacoop.ca/index.php?q=durban for some Canadian independent journalists’ take on UNFCCC;
http://www.climatepasifika.blogspot.com/ – Perspectives of Pacific Island delegates
http://ielpblog.tumblr.com/ – Law students from Lewis and Clark’s International Environmental Law Project (yes, I was once a proud IELPer)

Free Your Mind: Mind-mapping Software and Graduate School Exam Studying

Posted: November 24, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: cool stuff, reading & resources | Tags: , | Leave a comment »

Today I am grateful for (among many other things) a classmate who introduced me to FreeMind, a mind-mapping software program that is helping me add a bit of order to my sometimes chaotic orals reading. And I am grateful it is available for free. I have just started playing around with sorting my theory list by topic, but I plan to use the program to eventually lay out talking points and connections between texts.

(Click to enlarge)

CFP: “Occupied: Taking up Space and Time,” March 22-24, 2012

Posted: November 17, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: conferences, opportunities | Tags: , | Leave a comment »

Seems quite a few graduate conferences this year are tackling interdisciplinary themes relating to space! Indiana University–Bloomington’s Annual Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference seeks papers on the theme of:

“Occupied: Taking up Space and Time”

We are issuing a Call for Proposals for scholarly and creative submissions for an International Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference entitled “Occupied: Taking up Space and Time” to be held at Indiana University – Bloomington from March 22-24, 2012.  This 9th annual conference is hosted by the graduate students of the IU Department of English.Recent calls to occupy space for indefinite durations have provoked us to consider what it means to occupy or to be occupied both spatially and temporally.  The current position of “occupy” as a political buzzword confers a multiplicity of new meanings onto a concept already charged with complex histories and forms.  This conference seeks to explore the cultural significance and interrelations of its many meanings and implications, from mental pre-occupation and obsession, to the physical spaces we occupy (locked bathrooms to occupied nations), to the ways in which we spend or take up time.  Tracing the theoretical, formal, and political implications of this issue necessitates a variety of methodologies and disciplinary perspectives, so we particularly welcome interdisciplinary approaches considering any time period. Below are some suggestions for possible topics. This list is by no means exhaustive; rather, we hope these ideas might inspire some exciting new thoughts related to the theme:

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CFP: Graduate Colloquium on “Indigenous Spaces,” February 15, 2012

Posted: November 14, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: conferences, opportunities | Tags: , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

The newly created Collaborations on Indigenous Studies Project (CISP) at Columbia University is accepting paper proposals for its first graduate student colloquium:

Indigenous Spaces:

Pushing the Boundaries of History, Bodies, Geographies, and Politics

A Graduate Student Colloquium

Presented by

The Collaborations on Indigenous Studies Project (CISP)

Columbia University

February 15, 2012

We invite graduate students to submit proposals for a graduate student colloquium on the theme of Indigenous Spaces: Pushing the Boundaries of History, Bodies, Geographies, and Politics, to take place at Columbia University in the City of New York on February 15, 2012. Contributors are encouraged to think about ‘indigenous spaces’ that connect indigenous communities, bodies (understood in a broad sense), histories, geographies, and academia.

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CFP: “Exploring I–Lands: Borders, Identity and Myth,” March 16-18, 2012

Posted: November 13, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: conferences, opportunities | Tags: , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

The University of Virginia Department of English Graduate Conference seeks paper proposals from graduate students in all disciplines. Featured speakers will be Lorna Goodison and Jahan Ramazani. Abstracts are due January 21, 2012.

“Exploring I–Lands: Borders, Identity and Myth”

March 16-18, 2012

Borders abide and abound—between disciplines, between languages, between periods, between persons, between genders, between communities, between generations, between the self and the world. They define us in both liberating and limiting ways. This conference will investigate how borders and barriers are made, broken and refashioned, giving special attention to individual and national identities and the mythologies that inform them. Just how impermeable are such borders? Is there an unshakeable human drive to draw them?

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On Walls and the Spectacle of Sovereignty

Posted: November 1, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: current events, reading & resources | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments »

My oral exams are scheduled for late January, which means the past month has been a frenzy of reading and the next three promise to be equally busy. The bright side is that my program gives us a lot of freedom in formulating reading lists, so one of mine is a rather idiosyncratic theory list focusing on race, global studies, law, and spatial theory—my small effort to chip away at the walls, so to speak, between the disciplines that have informed my studies.

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of reading Wendy Brown’s Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (MIT Press, 2010). The book begins with a meditation on the recent spate of global wall-building that paradoxically coincides with supposed weakening of nation-state boundaries. The most well-known examples are the winding Israeli West Bank barrier and the exorbitantly expensive (and ineffective) high-tech “fence” that now separates the U.S. from Mexico. Brown notes astutely that these walls are meant not really to strengthen borders between nations, but rather to keep out certain non-governmental, transnational forces perceived as a threat to sovereignty—yearning would-be immigrant masses, illegal drug trade, terrorism. Moreover, these walls serve a significant symbolic function: they are “iconographic of” and spectacularize the idea of sovereignty for a privileged population anxious about its porous cultural and political borders. Of course, to say that walls are spectacles of sovereignty is not at all to diminish their material, often destructive consequences, which have been many.

Reading Brown’s book reminded me of my visit to Germany this summer. Having only one day to spend in Berlin, I headed for the East Side Gallery, a kilometer-long section of the Berlin Wall that has been transformed by artists into an “International Memorial for Freedom.” I also walked through the bizarre historic site of Checkpoint Charlie, a former crossing point between the Soviet and American sectors, where a man dressed as a Cold War-era U.S. soldier still stands guard for photographic purposes. At both sites, I participated in the usual rituals celebrating the spread of democracy and economic freedom: that is, I took pictures (exercising my right to an individual point of view) and purchased postcards (participating in both transnational communication and the commodification of nostalgia). As Brown points out, something about walls offends the liberal worldview and westerners like to vaunt their demise, even as we deploy new walls for the “protection” of democracy.

Irony aside, the visits were actually quite moving for me, as I thought of the East Berliners who had risked (or lost) their lives trying to escape political oppression and economic stagnation, as well as my own family, which left Vietnam as boat people when I was a baby. I, like the average American, eschew romantic notions of how life would be better under communism (though my reasons might not be ordinary). Nevertheless, I know there are limits to the liberal tearing down of walls: in uncritically celebrating the spread of “freedom,” we risk forgetting the burdens we force on those living outside the walls we continue to build. It is true that freedom isn’t free—but Americans are usually not the ones who pay.

Law, Culture & the Humanities Graduate Student Workshop

Posted: September 13, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: conferences, opportunities | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment »

From the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities:

The Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities (ASLCH) welcomes applications for its first ever Graduate Student Workshop, to be held March 15, 2012. The half day Workshop immediately precedes the ASLCH Annual Meetings, to be hosted by Texas Wesleyan University School of Law March 16-17, 2012. Applicants can be graduate students from any discipline or law students with scholarly interests in Law, Culture, and the Humanities.

The Workshop’s aims are to promote the future development of the field of Law, Culture and the Humanities through the development of our junior colleagues by bringing together graduate students and established scholars in Law, Culture, and the Humanities. During seminars, panel discussions, informal conversation, and shared meals, we will discuss scholarly work, give feedback on student research projects, address issues pertinent to professional development, and facilitate scholarly networks between graduate and faculty colleagues by encouraging intellectual community.

The Graduate Student Committee of ASLCH for 2011-2012, who will be planning the Workshop, includes Paul A. Passavant, Chair (Department of Political Science, Hobart and William Smith Colleges), Austin Sarat (Departments of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought and Political Science, Amherst College), Stewart Motha (Kent Law School, University of Kent), Marianne Constable (Department of Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley), and Ravit Reichman (Department of English, Brown University).

ASLCH will subsidize the participation of up to 15 successful graduate student applications. The deadline for applications is Friday December 2, 2011. Applications should be sent electronically to Professor Paul A. Passavant, Department of Political Science, Hobart and William Smith Colleges (Passavant [at] hws.edu).

Applications should include a Curriculum Vitae (CV), the title and abstract of the student’s proposed paper for the ASLCH Annual Meetings March 16-17, 2012, and a letter not longer than two pages describing the student’s status in graduate school, the student’s dissertation or significant interest in Law, Culture, and the Humanities, and what the student hopes to gain from attending the Workshop.

National Security Law Student Note/Essay Competition

Posted: September 13, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: opportunities | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment »

From the editors of the William Mitchell Law Review:

The William Mitchell Law Review is conducting a nation-wide student note competition.  Students are invited to submit case notes or essays on any subject related to national security.  The Law Review staff will evaluate all the submissions, and one winning entry will be published in the forthcoming issue.  All entries must be received by December 1, 2011.

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Osnabrück Update: Law, Literature, and the Nation

Posted: August 17, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: conferences, reading & resources | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment »

“Law, Literature, and the Cultural Presence of the Law,” a workshop convened by Claudia Lieb and Brook Thomas as part of the Summer School, has been examining the many possible relationships between law and literature by focusing on “the nation” as a site of disciplinary convergence.

The workshop’s well-structured reading list began by tracing the history of citizenship and the nation-state, and moved on to literary theory treating law and the nation, including work by Guyora Binder/Robert Weisberg and Homi Bhabha. As a “law and literature” case study, the workshop then examined E.E. Hale’s Civil War-era short story, “The Man Without a Country” (1863) in view of the historical controversy that inspired it: Clement Vallandigham, a Union politician, was arrested and punished for speaking out against the Civil War. The Vallandigham case sparked a “reply” by President Abraham Lincoln arguing that the government may, during times of rebellion, suspend habeas corpus, prohibit anti-war speech, and try protesters in military court. The case raised constitutional issues that have resurfaced several times in U.S. history, most recently, of course, during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Hale’s patriotic short story should interest those who study nationalism and citizenship. It concerns a young American man who speaks out against his country and is sentenced to spend the rest of his life never seeing or hearing another word about the United States. Over time, the man (named Nolan, a play on “no land”) feels the loss of his country deeply and by the end of his life is a fully reformed, though still exiled, patriot. Although the story is fictitious, Thomas notes, some readers took it to be true and its nationalistic message resonated widely; it was a staple of American high school curricula until the 1970s and has experienced something of a revival since 9/11.

Law, Language & Culture Reading Lists from Osnabrück Summer School

Posted: August 14, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: conferences, reading & resources | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Many thanks to Director Peter Schneck and the faculty of the Summer School for giving permission to share these valuable reading lists.

The reading list for Workshop 1, entitled “The Complex Relation between Culture and Law: Methods, Concepts, Approaches,” was posted earlier.

Detailed workshop descriptions can be found here (scroll down for links).

Workshop 2: From Human Rights to Civil Rights to Cultural Rights

Convened by: Helle Porsdam & Cindy Holder

  • Anaya, S. James. Indigenous Peoples in International Law. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. Read p. 129-48.
  • Jones, Peter. “Human Rights, Group Rights and Peoples’ Rights.” Human Rights Quarterly 21.1 (1999): 80-107.
  • Porsdam, Helle. “Divergent Transatlantic Views on Human Rights: Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights.” From Civil to Human Rights: Dialogues on Law and Humanities in the United States and Europe. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2009. Read p. 92-113.
  • —. “Divergent Transatlantic Views on Human Rights: The Role of International Law.” From Civil to Human Rights: Dialogues on Law and Humanities in the United States and Europe. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2009. Read p. 114-35.
  • —. “Transatlantic dialogues on copyright: cultural rights and access to knowledge From Civil to Human Rights: Dialogues on Law and Humanities in the United States and Europe. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2009. Read p. 136-64.
  • Raz, Joseph. “Rights and Individual Well-being.” Ratio Juris 5.2 (1992): 127-42.
  • Reidel, Laura. “What are Cultural Rights: Protecting Groups with Individual Rights.” Journal of Human Rights 9 (2010): 65-80.
  • Supreme Court of Canada , R v Van der Peet [1996] 2 S.C.R. 507

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Storytelling and Human Rights: Osnabrück Summer School Keynote Available Online

Posted: August 12, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: reading & resources | Tags: , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Kay Schaffer’s keynote lecture, “Revisiting Human Rights and Narrated Lives: Aims, Methods, Contexts,” is now available online.

Osnabrück Summer School on Law, Language & Culture: Methodology Reading List & Keynote Talk

Posted: August 11, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: conferences, reading & resources | Tags: , , , , | Leave a comment »

Greetings from Osnabrück, Germany, where I am attending the International Summer School on the Cultural Study of the Law, this year themed “Correlations: Law, Language and Culture.” The program is an annual, two-week series of workshops for graduate students and new scholars, taught by faculty from various disciplines. I am grateful to Professors Peter Schneck and Sabine Meyer (and their staff) for organizing the Summer School, as well as to DAAD, Osnabrück University, and the other organizations that fund the program.

The opening workshop took place over two days and concerned methodological problems in interdisciplinary study of law, language, and culture. Workshop convenors Kay Schaffer and Martin Zeilinger compiled this reading list for participants (shared with permission):

  • Brown, Wendy. “‘The Most We Can Hope For’: Human Rights and the Politics of Fatalism.” South Atlantic Quarterly 103.2/3 (2004): 451-63.
  • —. “Neo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy.” Theory and Event 7.1(2003): n. pag.
  • Coombe, Rosemary J. “Contingent Articulations.” Law in the Domains of Culture.” Ed. Austin Sarat, Thomas R. Kearns. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1998. 21-64.
  • Holder, Cindy. “Culture as an Activity and Human Right: An Important Advance for Indigenous Peoples and International Law.” Alternatives 33 (2008): 7-28.
  • Kymlicka, Will. Multicultural Citizenship. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. Read Chapter 3: Individual Rights and Collective Rights; p. 34-48 and Chapter 5: Freedom and Culture; 84-101.
  • Mezey, Naomi. “Law as Culture.” Cultural Analysis, Cultural Studies, and the Law: Moving beyond Legal Realism. Ed. Austin Sarat, Jonathan Simon. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. 37-72.
  • Olson, Greta. “De-Americanizing Law and Literature Narratives: Opening Up the Story.” Law and Literature 22.1 (2010): 338-64.
  • Porsdam, Helle. From Civil to Human Rights: Dialogues on Law and Humanities in the United States and Europe. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2009. Read Chapter 8: Transatlantic dialogues on ‘law and literature’: from ‘law and literature’ to ‘law and humanities’; p. 165-81.
  • Schaffer, Kay, and Sidonie Smith. Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004. Read p. 35-53; 123-52.
  • Thomas, Brook. “Reflections on the Law and Literature Revival.” Critical Inquiry 17.3 (1991): 510-39.

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Mapping Native American History with Hopi Landscape Portal Software

Posted: August 1, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: cool stuff | Tags: , , , , | Leave a comment »

Many thanks to @giantpandinha for tweeting the Hopi Landscape Portal, a new historical mapping project by Wes Bernardini of University of Redlands. Bernardini’s program, which uses ArcGIS Explorer software, allows users to explore 3D reconstructions of 32 Hopi villages. According to an Indian Country article,

Bernardini has been working with the Hopi for the last decade on mapping the ancestral villages. He uses conventional archaeological data as well as Hopi traditional knowledge to get a clearer picture of the past.

“Everything in my work started with, and continually goes back to, Hopi oral tradition,” he told ICTMN. “It was the clan migration traditions recounted to me by Hopi colleagues that first helped me to see that archaeological ideas about Hopi migrations were incomplete, and each visit to Hopi adds new pieces of information that help me to see the archaeological record in a new light.”

Transatlantic Slave Trade Maps Online

Posted: July 29, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: cool stuff, reading & resources | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment »

Many thanks to @donaculcinea for tweeting this terrific resource: a set of nine introductory maps detailing the transatlantic slave trade.

The maps, excerpted from Eltis and Richardson’s Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Yale UP, 2010), are posted on the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database website, an extensive repository of information about slavery and slave trade voyages.

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