Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law

The third Workshop will be conducted by Cassandra Falke and Ted Laros on the topic of Literature and Human Rights.

In his influential book The End of Human Rights (2000), Costas Douzinas distinguishes between what he calls the “subjective perspective on human rights” and the “institutional perspective on human rights” (402). The former refers to the perspective of the individual from which emanates the “political experience of freedom, the expression of the battle to free individuals from external constraint and allow their self-realisation” (402); the latter to a perspective that is “related, but relatively distinct” (402) to the subjective perspective and that first and foremost is the domain of domestic and international law. As history and the current time shows, however, literature can also play an important role in this latter domain. In this workshop, we will reflect on the ways in which literature can intervene in human rights discourse on both levels. We will do so by analyzing two cases: that of Antije Krog, a poet, writer and academic whose life and work in many ways exemplifies how literary actors can actively engage with human rights and have an impact when doing so, and that of Nam Le, whose writing questions the extent to which an experience of freedom can be restored after external restrictions disappear and threats are allayed. Both cases demonstrate that engagement is generally accompannied by ethical complications.

Our second Workshop will be held by Jeannine DeLombard and Angela Naimou on the topic of From Slavery to Deportation: Moving Subjects/Changing Law.

Throughout U.S. history, both federal and state governments have sought to construct and constrain citizenship, belonging, and identity through the forcible or involuntary movement of populations of color within and across national borders. And throughout that history, individuals, families, and communities on the move have deployed legal concepts and processes to pursue – and achieve – their personal and collective interests. We will consider how subjects on the move engage and define law in transit in a range of literary historical and geopolitical contexts, from nineteenth-century portrayals of fugitives from slavery to accounts of extraordinary rendition and deportation since 2001.