Anticolonial Interventions in Legal Culture (2024)

“Anticolonial Interventions in Legal Culture,” a one-day hybrid event on law and humanities from the Global South

Jarvis McInnis, Duke University (10:20am): “Plotting the Global Black South: On Provision Grounds, Legal Personhood, & Eco-Ontology”
Leila Neti, Occidental College (11:20am) “Filthy Water, Filthy Rich”
Luis Cárcamo-Huechante, UT Austin (12:30pm), “Voices and Sounds of Indigenous Liberation: Statements of Autonomy on Mapuche Lands”
Miguel Rábago Dorbecker, CIDE-México (1:30pm) “Narratives of State Responsibility for Tlatelolco in 1968: La noche de Tlatelolco and the Memorial del 68 as Officialized Narratives”
Yogita Goyal, UCLA (3:00pm), “Globalizing Caste: Race, Class, and Comparison”

Zoom registration: https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_DFJmAceIQqWlW9Qf6DJTHg

Limited in-person space at Bolivar House (Center for Latin American Studies; 582 Alvarado Row, Stanford, CA 94305)

For abstracts and more information, please see below.

On Friday, April 14, Law and Literature in the Global South, a workshop series under the auspices of Stanford Global Studies that moves the Law and Humanities critical paradigm beyond conversations of legal and cultural practices in/from the Global North. On Friday, April 14, 2023, the group will bring scholars of Law and Humanities grounded in the Global South to the Stanford campus. This event highlights thought from the Global South as the site of theorization and lively intellectual pursuits in solidarity both in South-South ties and South-North ties, convening practitioners who engage with global concerns and bring to the table innovative approaches.

This event builds on previous meetings of the workshop series, building on successful Zoom events in AY2021-22. This in-person event will bring critical discussion to the campus and engage graduate students and faculty to benefit their research agendas and continue serving the Stanford community, especially continuing discussions begun around the heuristic of “anticolonial interdisciplinarity” (a roundtable with Susana Draper, Samera Esmeir, and Joseph Slaughter), the rights of nature and the imagination (Alberto Acosta, Alyse Bertenthal, and Allison Bigelow), and law-and-humanities methodological concerns (with Diana Guzmán Rodríguez, Leila Neti, Beth Piatote, and Marco Wan).

The day’s proceedings will begin at 10:00 am with opening remarks by Héctor Hoyos (Stanford University). This will be followed by presentations from (see below for more speaker bios and abstracts):

Luis Cárcamo-Huechante (University of Texas - Austin)
Yogita Goyal (University of California - Los Angeles)
Jarvis McInnis (Duke Unversity)
Leila Neti (Occidental College)
Miguel Rábago Dorbecker (Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas; México)

With discussants including:

E. Tendayi Achiume (UCLA; Stanford Visiting Faculty)
Ximena Briceño (Stanford University)
Haiyan Lee (Stanford University)
Bernadette Meyler (Stanford University)
Vaughn Rasberry (Stanford University)

Organizers:

Sara Clemente (Events and Communications Officer at CLAS)
Héctor Hoyos (Faculty PI)
Namrata Verghese (graduate-student organizer)
Joseph Wager (graduate-student organizer)

This event is hosted by Stanford Global Studies through the workshop series “Law and Literature in the Global South” with generous cosponsorhip from:

Department of English
Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity
McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society
Center for Latin American Studies
Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures

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Jarvis McInnis, Duke University (10:20am)

Plotting the Global Black South: On Provision Grounds, Legal Personhood, & Eco-Ontology

In the 18^th century, the British parliament passed legislation requiring planters in its Caribbean colonies to allot enslaved peoples provision grounds, or garden plots, to grow food to feed and sustain themselves. These small parcels were often on the outskirts of plantations and on lands too poor for sugarcane cultivation. While the enslaved were not rights-bearing subjects, effectively positioned outside of the category of legal personhood, these plots/provision grounds became liminal spaces that, paradoxically, allowed “property” to “own” property. Enslaved people not only worked their plots to feed themselves and their families, but also sold their surplus produce in local markets and could even bequeath their parcels to family members upon death. In Caribbean Studies, numerous scholars have theorized the plot/provision ground as a crucible of black resistance to the plantation system: a counter-geography wherein enslaved peoples cultivated a sense of individualism and maintained communal values, folk aesthetics, and a more ethical and sustainable relation to the earth. While enslaved peoples in the southern United States also planted gardens to supplement their meager food provisions, planters were not legally required to allot them provision grounds; thus, the practice was more uneven and unsystematic. Still, enslaved African Americans’ ability to provide for themselves by cultivating the earth would have surely infused them with a sense of proprietorship and self-determination similar to their counterparts in the British Caribbean. This paper turns to contemporary African American and Caribbean literatures and theory to: 1) examine the plot/provision ground as a diasporic geography that connects Afro-descended peoples navigating the afterlife of the plantation in the global black south, and 2) interrogate the paradoxical relationship between quasi-property ownership and subsistence farming on the plot to notions of legal personhood and ontological reclamation (what I call “eco-ontology”) during slavery and its aftermath. Lastly, I track the logics and ethics of the plot—i.e., self-determination, communal values, aesthetics, and care for the earth—to the post-emancipation US South. In 1897, the state of Alabama passed legislation establishing an agricultural experiment station at Booker T. Washington’s school, the Tuskegee Institute. Tuskegee’s experiment station, also known as the “experiment plot,” was renowned agricultural scientist George Washington Carver’s laboratory for studying soil regeneration and sustainable cultivation methods in response to the abusive and extractive practices introduced by the plantation regime. Thus, this paper will also consider how Washington and Carver utilized scientific experimentation, literature, and visual culture to modernize the plot/provision ground to counter the ongoing assault on black legal personhood in the early twentieth century US.

Jarvis C. McInnis is an interdisciplinary scholar of African American & African Diaspora literature and culture, with teaching and research interests in the global south (primarily the US South and the Caribbean), sound studies, performance studies, and visual culture. He is currently at work on his first book project, tentatively titled, “The Afterlives of the Plantation: Aesthetics, Labor, and Diaspora in the Global Black South,” which aims to reorient the geographic contours of black transnationalism and diaspora by exploring the hemispheric linkages between southern African American and Caribbean literature and culture in the early twentieth century. His work appears or is forthcoming in journals and venues such as Callaloo, MELUS, Mississippi Quarterly, Public Books, and The Global South. His essay, "A 'Reorder of Things' in Black Studies: Sacred Praxis, Phono(geo)graphy, and the Counter-Archive of Diaspora," was awarded the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora's (ASWAD) Outstanding Article Prize honoring an outstanding peer-reviewed article focused on Africa and/or the African diaspora.

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Leila Neti, Occidental College (11:20am)

Filthy Water, Filthy Rich

This paper considers Mohsin Hamid’s 2013 novel How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, alongside colonial era water laws on the Indian subcontinent. Water security for both drinking and irrigation purposes have historically been linked to the economic imperatives of colonialism. Access to water for the cultivation of crops, sanitation, and drinking was controlled through various forms of legislation during the colonial era. In the postcolonial period, the material legacies of these laws continue to foster inequitable access to water across the subcontinent. Focusing on the tragicomic exploits of “you,” the unnamed protagonist in Hamid’s second- person narrative, this paper examines how manipulating the water market generates “your” economic success. Hamid’s parodic representation of “you” bottling dirty tap water in order to sell it to Asia’s thirsty bourgeoisie trains its critical lens on multiple layers of local corruption, as well as global complicity, in a market that derives its model from colonial restrictions on water. In order to understand the contemporary politics of access to water, that trace their origins to famine-era legislation, I look at the Canal and Drainage Act (1873), Indian Easem*nts Act (1892), and Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages (P) Ltd. v. Perumatty Grama Panchayat (2005) among other legal interventions. Placing these legal acts in relation to Hamid’s Bildungsroman enables us to investigate the forms of subjectivity produced through the commodification of water.

Leila Neti specializes in Victorian literature, contemporary Anglophone literature, postcolonial theory, and law and literature. Her research focuses on how legal formations intersect with literary representations to produce notions of self and sovereignty, particularly with respect to race, gender, class, and sexuality. Her book, Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2021) is situated at the intersection of law and literature, nineteenth-century studies, and postcolonialism. The book draws on original archival research to shed new light on Victorian literature, with each chapter exploring the relational ways in which the shared cultural logic of law and literature inflect colonial sociality.

Luis Cárcamo-Huechante, UT Austin (12:30pm)

Voices and Sounds of Indigenous Liberation: Statements of Autonomy on Mapuche Lands

This talk will focus on what I characterize as material and symbolic exercises of Indigenous autonomy in the context of the struggles of the Mapuche movement in recent decades in what are known today as “Chile” and “Argentina.” From this angle, my presentation aims to highlight textual and corporeal, material, and symbolic, non-textual and textual acts–such as Mapuche political mobilizations, literary works, and musical expressions–which embody modes of Indigenous territorialization. In my view, these events constitute acts of Indigenous liberation that “interfere” and “suspend” the legal and geopolitical scripts and mandates of the settler colonial Chilean and Argentine nation-states. Likewise, these become acts through which the autonomous exercise of indigeneity “blows up” hegemonic configurations of temporality, space, and law.

Luis E. Cárcamo-Huechante is a Mapuche scholar. He is currently the Director of the Program in Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) and an Associate Professor of Spanish at The University of Texas at Austin. He is a founding member of the Comunidad de Historia Mapuche, which is a collective of Mapuche researchers/activists based in southern Chile. In 2007, he published his first book, Tramas del mercado: imaginación económica, cultura pública y literatura en el Chile de fines del siglo veinte (Santiago: Editorial Cuarto Propio). He has just completed a book manuscript that analyzes literary texts, radio shows and music to discuss questions of indigeneity, language and sound in relation to what he calls “acoustic colonialism.”

Miguel Rábago Dorbecker, CIDE-México (1:30pm)

Narratives of State Responsibility for Tlatelolco in 1968: La noche de Tlatelolco and the Memorial del 68 as Officialized Narratives

1968 is considered not only one the most important events for Mexican politics but also in defining the New Left in the context of the 'global 68.' The main narrative, or crónica, that first arose as one of the few critical narratives against governmental negation was Elena Poniatowska’s La noche de Tlatelolco. The changing political circ*mstances have converted a chronicle of the events into one of the most revered texts of such events. One place in which officialization of La noche de Tlatelolco can be observed is in the official memorial site of the National University in Tlatelolco, Memorial del 68. This paper will analyze the disputes around the aesthetic representation of 68 and its contested legacy.

Miguel Rábago Dorbecker is Professor of Law at the Centro de Estudios e Investigaciones Económicas (CIDE), Mexico City. He has previously been a professor at the Universidad de los Andes in Colombia, Universidade Federal do Para in Brazil, and the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. His main areas of research are related to Law and the Humanities, International Law, and Legal Theory.

Yogita Goyal, UCLA (3:00pm)

Globalizing Caste: Race, Class, and Comparison

This talk returns to persistent comparisons of race and caste as formations within a global human rights discourse, reading recent efforts to compare race to caste alongside a much longer history of failed juxtapositions. Considering how exceptionalist claims about race in the United States and caste in India are thrown into crisis when read as symbiotic histories, mutually formative and unexpectedly connected, the talk explores how previous histories of radicalism in antiracist and anticolonial thought have come into the present.

Yogita Goyal is Professor of African American Studies and English at UCLA and the author of Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature (2010) and Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery (2019), which won the René Wellek Prize from ACLA, the Perkins prize from the International Society for the Study of Narrative and Honorable Mention for the James Russell Lowell Prize from MLA. Past President of A.S.A.P., she has published widely on African diaspora, postcolonial, and US literature and is working on The Genres of Anticolonialism, a study of mid-twentieth century anticolonial thought and its current revival.