Philip Kaisary is the 2023–25 Ruth and Mark Phillips Professor in Cultural Mediations and an Associate Professor in the Department of Law and Legal Studies, the Department of English Language and Literature, and the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture at Carleton University. He works in Caribbean and Latin American studies; Marxist literary and cultural theory; human rights; critical social theory; ‘world-literature’; ‘Law, Culture, and the Humanities’; and ‘Law and Literature’. His publications include From Havana to Hollywood: Slave Resistance in the Cinematic Imaginary (SUNY Press, 2024) and The Haitian Revolution in the Literary Imagination: Radical Horizons, Conservative Constraints (University of Virginia Press, 2014). Born within the sound of the Bow Bells in London, he now lives in Ottawa, Ontario.
Centre for Critical Legal Studies, Lunchtime Seminar Series, School of Law, University of Warwick, March 6, 2024.
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/newsandevents/events/?calendarItem=8a1785d78c58b3f9018c5e63776a3525
Postcolonial and World Literatures Research Seminar Series, Wadham College, Oxford University, March 7, 2024.
https://talks.ox.ac.uk/talks/id/f7326874-4a94-4744-8530-4c9000bff645/
School of Media, Arts, and Humanities, Sussex University, March 13, 2024.
Centre for Latin American Studies, Cambridge University, March 14, 2024.
I am thrilled to announce that Auritro Majumder will deliver the 2024 Ruth and Mark Phillips Professor guest lecture. 5:30pm, March 20, 2024, Patterson Hall 303, Carleton University. Auritro’s lecture is titled: “(Third) World Literature and Decolonization: Humanist Internationalism and Contemporary Literary Studies”.
Sarah Brouillette and I will be hosting Anna Kornbluh this spring! Anna will deliver this year’s Chris Faulkner Lecture in Cultural Mediations. Anna will be speaking about her new book, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism. 4:00pm, April 18, 2024, Patterson Hall 303, Carleton University.
At the 56th Annual NEMLA Convention in Philadelphia, March 6-9th, 2025, Dr. Philip Kaisary will organize and moderate a panel titled “Radical Futures and Decolonization: Law, Marxism and World Literature.”
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.