Today in the Malaysia Star, Shad Saleem Faruqi published “In law, West is not really best,” an article arguing that the fundamental paradigms of legal pedagogy in Malaysia remain Western. Faruqi laments this fact and declares that despite years of experimentation, legal education “today is as much a colonial construct as it was during the days of the raj.” Read the rest of this entry »
Click here to read my latest law-and-literature article. Below is the abstract for the article, which appears in Libertarian Papers:
E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India presents Brahman Hindu jurisprudence as an alternative to British rule of law, a utilitarian jurisprudence that hinges on mercantilism, central planning, and imperialism. Building on John Hasnas’s critiques of rule of law and Murray Rothbard’s critiques of Benthamite utilitarianism, this essay argues that Forster’s depictions of Brahman Hindu in the novel endorse polycentric legal systems. Mr. Turton is the local district collector whose job is to pander to both British and Indian interests; positioned as such, Turton is a site for critique and comparison. Forster uses Turton to show that Brahman Hindu jurisprudence is fair and more effective than British bureaucratic administration. Forster’s depictions of Brahman Hindu are not verisimilar, and Brahman Hindu does not recommend a particular jurisprudence. But Forster appropriates Brahman Hindu for aesthetic and political purposes and in so doing advocates a jurisprudence that does not reduce all experience to mathematical calculation. Forster writes against the Benthamite utilitarianism adopted by most colonial administrators in India. A tough figure to pin down politically, Forster celebrates the individual and personal relations: things that British rule of law seeks to suppress.
If pragmatism is, as Joan Richardson claims, “thinking about thinking” (79), and if Emerson is, as Richardson claims, a pragmatist, then we might ask ourselves what intellectual tradition Emerson appears to appropriate and modify. What are Emerson’s “moving pictures” (the title of Richardson’s chapter on Emerson), and how do they receive and transmit thought and theory? Richardson seems to suggest that, for Emerson as for Jonathan Edwards, nature and imagination are mutually reinforcing and inextricably tied concepts. Emerson works out of Edwards’s paradigms while altering them to fit his own historical moment. Emerson mimics not only Edwards’s intellectual framework—his theories—but also Edwards’s diction and syntax (63). Put differently, Emerson imitates a concept while imitating the vocabularies through which that concept passed down to him.
What makes Edwards and Emerson unique is their turn to nature to make sense of the “transcendent.” Just as Edwards looks to spiders and light to aestheticize his theology and exhilarate his congregation, so Emerson looks to nature to spiritualize the human mind. Both men observe and then internalize the natural world to refine their thinking about thinking. For Emerson, however, the human mind is itself an organism—one hungry for knowledge. The mind is not so much “the room of the idea” as it is a living being with an appetite for thought (67). Emerson employs and seeks out metaphor to organize this thought—one might say to satiate his ravenous intellectual appetite—and he does so because he realizes “the seminal role played by image” (68). The world, for Emerson, is full of semiotic possibility, and one can arrive at truths about reality through the study of metaphor. Science, after all, uses signs and symbols—i.e., metaphors—to test and decode the natural world (see, e.g., Richardson on the “metaphor intrinsic to biology’s emergence as a distinct field”) (69). Read the rest of this entry »
Recently I was reading Erika Lindemann’s book A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). I was preparing for class and needed some inspiration from someone far smarter. I found that inspiration in Lindemann’s chapter “What Do Teachers Need to Know about Linguistics?” I won’t go into how I used that chapter for class but would like to expand on what Lindemann calls “graphic conventions” (62).
Focusing on the “role language plays in composing, especially at the writing and rewriting stages,” Lindemann argues that writing instructors need a greater facility with English linguistics to understand the composition process—specifically, to understand how students select and appropriate diction (60). This premise leads Lindemann into a discussion of alphabets and symbols with linguistic values (62).
Lindemann’s claims about how matters of taste are always braided with “our assumptions about what language should and shouldn’t be” are interesting, but this post discusses what language might be.
Language can become a vehicle for discovering “truth.” Literature, made up of language, can become, to employ Kenneth Burke’s phrase, equipment for living. By “truth” I don’t necessarily mean moral truth. I mean physical truth. Language is a system of meaning that makes truth—the referent—intelligible even if it only signifies or stands in the place of reality. Read the rest of this entry »
I will be blogging at a new site created by Dr. Troy Camplin. The name of the site, which was inspired by Paul Cantor & Stephen Cox’s Literature & the Economics of Liberty, is Austrian Economics and Literature.
Kris Collins interrogates the mutually affirming racial discourses of the theater and the natural sciences in nineteenth-century America.
“The nineteenth-century scientific community’s fascination with the black body,” Collins explains, “provides a contemporary analytical template for the racialized anxieties expressed in both minstrelsy and mainstage productions of Othello: white America’s struggle to define and defend the whiteness of their own bodies” (88).
Collins focuses on the work of several white Euro-American scientists: George Gliddon, Josiah Nott, Herman Burmeiter, Cesare Lombroso, Samuel G. Morton, and Louis Agassiz. All of these men classify races hierarchically and by taxonomies putatively dependent on racial intelligence. Because of the inherent differences between the races, these scientists argue, the white population should not mingle, sexually or otherwise, with the black population. Collins thoroughly debunks these claims, which she relates to nineteenth-century minstrel performances of Othello that solidify racist significations of the black body.
While the scientists that Collins identifies opined on racial distinction, another scientist, the young Charles Darwin, dissertated on theories of natural selection and evolution. One wonders whether Darwin’s ideas about genetics and heritable traits influenced the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century stage as much as Collins’s subjects influenced the stage in the preceding era.
More to the point, Herbert Spencer’s appropriations of Darwin—epitomized by the phrase “survival of the fittest”—may have justified and authorized racial divisions at the same time that high brow / low brow and elite / popular distinctions began to congeal. This simultaneous segregation (scientific and socio-cultural) was not so much coincidental as mutually (re)affirming.
Bardification and Shakespeare idolatry proliferated along with scientific discourses suggesting that whites were “better adapted” or “more advanced” than people of color. Shakespearean performances—most notably blackface performances of Othello but also early twentieth-century performances starring African American actors as Othello—gradually and perhaps unwittingly reflected the Spencerian drive to “preserve” the “favored” races.
This argument is the logical extension of Collins’s work; it compels a look at the continued influence of natural science on the next generation of American actors, directors, and theater-goers. Although the display of scientific racism and its corresponding effect on the theater may have changed, the underlying idea of racial superiority remained in place.
For further reading:
Collins, Kris. “White-Washing the Black-a-Moor: Othello, Negro Minstrelsy and Parodies of Blackness. The Journal of American Culture 19.3 (June 2004), pp. 87-101.
My writing instructors in law school parroted a line that I considered both annoying and at times wrong: “This is bad writing.” The criteria for what constituted bad (as opposed to good) writing had to do, invariably, with rigid rules of grammar and syntax. A sentence was “bad,” for example, if it failed to have a comma following an introductory prepositional phrase; or a sentence was good, even if it sounded awkward, so long as it did not violate any rule of basic grammar. Such over-commitment to formalism quashed any sense of experimentation or creativity that the students might have had. Rather than trying out new styles and syntaxes, students confined their writing to short, plain statements of fact and conclusion. Their papers read like boring how-to manuals: monotone and tedious, never lively and engaging. The problem, as I see it, is that legal writing instructors have little awareness of audience. They simply have no notion of what Stanley Fish calls “interpretive communities” and so have no notion of genre (categories of discourse) or performative text (text that mimics or signals certain categories of discourse). Legal writing instructors locate students within a field of discourse akin to technical writing, but they never explain to students why technical writing is appropriate or even desirable in a legal context. Instead, they inform students that anything that is not technical writing is bad, and they do so without realizing that different communities may have different expectations or prefer different techniques and vocabularies. Legal writing instructors never explain that certain modes of writing can be good in other contexts but instead treat all writing as belonging to one classificatory scheme. They force writing into one of two categories—good or bad—without regard to the quality of writing as contextualized in other communities. Such habits simply will not do. Read the rest of this entry »
In Repositioning Shakespeare, Thomas Cartelli situates Whitman’s Shakespeare in contradistinction to Emerson’s Shakespeare.
The phrase “Whitman’s Shakespeare” is, in a way, an odd construction because Whitman did not seek to claim “ownership” of Shakespeare so much as he sought an “appropriation and critical transformation” of Shakespeare (32). Cartelli submits, in fact, that Whitman “brought a contentiously critical approach to bear on his assessments of Shakespeare” (30).
Although Cartelli pays lip-service to Emerson’s ambivalence about Shakespeare, he concludes that Emerson transformed the Bard of Avon “into a virtual founding father” by attempting “an act of wishful appropriation in which the (literary) model that cannot be superseded is annexed by the (political) model that supersedes” (33).
Cartelli thus seems convinced that Shakespeare shaped Whitman’s and Emerson’s thought, but he seems unsettled about how and why.
John Ernest, Eberly Distinguished Professor of American Literature at West Virginia University, has written a new book, Chaotic Justice, that should appeal to lawyers and law professors alike. Ernest’s project began with basic research on Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892), but over time Ernest realized that, in his words, “I did not know nearly enough about the literary and cultural history on which, according to my doctorate and professional experience, I was supposed to be an expert.” Ernest found himself “increasingly convinced that we cannot appreciate American literary and cultural history without a deep understanding of nineteenth-century African American literature,” so he set out to gain that understanding and to convey his findings to a wide audience. Some of the articles he published along the way—in such journals as PMLA, African American Review, American Literature, and Arizona Quarterly—appear in the book, albeit in slightly different form.
Examining a vast network of authors who shaped the African American literary corpus, Ernest, a critical race theorist, has strong words for those who teach histories and theories about race as a nod toward idealized multiculturalism. “Too often,” he says, “social progress relating to race is considered to be an approach toward an imagined horizon by which either the color line gradually disappears or an imagined multiculturalist ideal emerges—an escape, in effect, from a social world largely constructed by and long devoted to racial theories and racist practices.” More harm than good, in other words, will come of a curriculum that celebrates a quixotic post-racial future while overlooking—or, worse, generalizing—about America’s fraught history of racism. Read the rest of this entry »
My article on Jefferson is going to print this month. Titled “‘Jefferson’s Laws of Nature’: Newtonian Influence and the Dual Valence of Jurisprudence and Science,” the article will appear in The Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence, Vol. 23, No. 2 (2010). View the SSRN page here.
The Literary Lawyer: A Forum for the Legal and Literary Communities 