Just Law symposium

The LJGPF seminar presents…

Just Law: Intervention, Reparation, Emancipation
May 3 & 4 2012

featuring new papers by
Amiel Melnick
Shea McManus
Anjuli Raza Kolb
Jini Kim Watson
Kareem Rabie
Jeremy Rayner

in conversation with
Mandana Limbert
Kandice Chuh
Sujatha Fernandes

and a keynote address by
Talal Asad

A full schedule of events is now available here.

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notes from 4/20 seminar

Opening remarks by Jay Blair:

Questions for discussion: What are the material conditions of abandonment? Do you see anticolonial, new social movements exhausting late liberalism and nonliberal nation-states like China enduring it, in agreement with Arrighi? With this mode of corporeality, does dispossession not occur regardless of tense? What makes a quasi-event an event at all, how to relate that to the social Continue reading…

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4/20 seminar with Elizabeth Povinelli

Elizabeth Povinelli, “The Child in the Broom Closet” in Economies of Abandonment
Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University

Discussant: Jay Blair, doctoral student, anthropology, CUNY Graduate Center

12 – 2pm, Room 8400 (Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue)

* All seminar readings are available here. If you are not on the seminar mailing list, and do not have the password to this page, please send us an email!

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notes from 2/3 seminar

Opening remarks by Amiel Melnick:

In tracing out links between what have been understood as different forms of insurance in the United States—insurance taken out on slaves, and life insurance—Michael Ralph’s paper draws our attention to speculative capital and its differential evaluation of human lives—or, as he puts it, the “subterranean trajectory that traffics in embodied labor and in the value to be extracted from the human as a capital asset” (19). This takes slave insurance as the basis for a range of evocative parallels between the logics of slavery and that of modern capital. These parallels are grounded in the histories of capital formation in the West—since the slave trade arguably provided the capital basis for the industrial revolution—and the 19th century emergence of a variety of financial techniques that continue to be of relevance to Continue reading…

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3/23 discussion on Muneer Ahmad

Discussion of selected readings by Muneer Ahmad

“Resisting Guantánamo: Rights at the Brink of Dehumanization,” Northwestern University Law Review 103.4 (2009): 1683-1763.

Discussant: Ximena García Bustamante, doctoral student, political science, CUNY Graduate Center

12 – 2pm, Room 7314 (Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue)

* All seminar readings are available here. If you are not on the seminar mailing list, and do not have the password to this page, please send us an email!

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3/19 special event

“Telling Histories”: a discussion between Laurent Dubois, Greg Grandin, and Gary Wilder

While Haiti’s complex and “cursed” past was often used by journalists to explain its recent and tragic upheaval, these historical retellings frequently did more to malign and undermine the promising cultural and political forces the country was founded on than to illuminate them. How might historians and other academics responsibly and effectively contribute to a global public discourse? Join Laurent Dubois (History, Duke University), the author of Haiti: The Aftershocks of History and Greg Grandin (History, NYU), the author of, among many other prize-winning books, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism for a discussion with Gary Wilder (Anthropology, The Graduate Center, CUNY) about the challenges of writing critical histories of nations and empires in the current political climate

Monday, March 19 @ 6:30pm, Room: C201/202 (Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue)

This public event is organized by the Center for the Humanities and the Committee on Globalization and Social Change. It is also cross-posted with the Caribbean Epistemologies seminar.

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notes from 3/9 seminar

Opening remarks by Mariana Assis:

I would like to start by suggesting a collective exercise of revisiting the objectives and questions initially raised by this seminar, so they remain on the background of our discussion of the relationship between emergency and rule of law as proposed by today’s reading. A relationship in which law asserts its capacity of maintaining itself in relation to an exteriority, that is to say by including within the legal system its own exclusion

This seminar is committed to unpacking the seemingly paradoxical fact that “despite the role of legal institutions in reproducing an unequal international order, demands for global justice continue to be shaped through legal claims.” Therefore, it seeks to address questions such as Continue reading…

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3/9 discussion on Nasser Hussain

Discussion of selected readings by Nasser Hussain

“Towards a Jurisprudence of Emergency,” Law and Critique 10 (1999): 93-115.

Discussant: Mariana Assis, doctoral student, political science, The New School

12 – 2pm, Room 6421 (Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue)

* All seminar readings are available here. If you are not on the seminar mailing list, and do not have the password to this page, please send us an email!

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notes from 12/9 seminar

Opening remarks by Jini Kim Watson:

I’d like to thank Nancy Fraser for sharing with us this provocative paper and for taking the time to join us today. I’m going to keep my comments brief, to allow for maximum time for discussion; I’ll start with commenting on a few of the contributions I see Professor Fraser making in her paper, and then follow up by raising some possible questions for discussion.

First – and I don’t actually need to summarize the argument of the paper because it was so lucidly laid out, but I’ll do this very quickly– one of Fraser’s main contributions here is to revisit the contribution of Karl Polanyi in his groundbreaking, but perhaps now little read work The Great Transformation Continue reading…

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2/3 seminar with Michael Ralph

Michael Ralph, “‘Life…in the midst of death’: Notes on the relationship between slave insurance and life insurance”
Assistant Professor, Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University

Discussant: Amiel Melnick, doctoral student, anthropology, Columbia University

12 – 2pm, Room 7314 (Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue)

* All seminar readings are available here. If you are not on the seminar mailing list, and do not have the password to this page, please send us an email!

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