Description:

This panel will consider Black diasporic literary and/or legal texts in relation to the interdisciplinary field of ‘Law and Literature.’ An emphasis will be placed on the relations and intersections of race, class, and gender, and the historical experience of capitalist modernity, as well as materialist approaches employing ‘world-literary’ perspectives.

Abstract:

This panel will consider Black diasporic literary and/or legal texts in relation to the interdisciplinary field of ‘Law and Literature.’ Literary and legal texts generated by the histories of African descended peoples throughout the Atlantic world brim with substance for law and literary studies, yet the field of Law and Literature has not identified Black diasporic writing as a privileged site of analysis. This panel addresses that gap, focusing on questions of race, class, gender, and the historical experience of capitalist modernity, alongside iterations of the law. The panel will contribute to the work of reimagining and reorienting Law and Literature along more globally inclusive and materialist lines.

Notwithstanding such notable recent work as Elizabeth S. Anker and Bernadette Meyler’s edited volume, New Directions in Law and Literature(Oxford University Press, 2017), Law and Literature’s Eurocentrism remains discernible in its tendency toward literary materials drawn largely or exclusively from European and White Anglo-American traditions. Conversely, the proposed panel is animated by the conviction that the task of ‘unthinking’ Eurocentrism is a precondition for the continued relevance of the Law and Literature project. To this end, the panel will engage with: (1) recent work undertaken within world literary studies which has argued for the reconceptualization of world literature as a problematic that demands theoretical and methodological reconsideration; (2) Black diasporic theoretical models that have situated African American literary and cultural production in American hemispheric and ‘Black Atlantic’ frames; and (3) work in the cultural materialist tradition that has sought to revisit the connectedness of legal and literary discourses in nuanced terms.

Link for Direct Abstract Submission: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21324