This is a recording of a November 22, 2024 CNLH-sponsored conversation and Q&A with Dr. Philip Kaisary on “Law and Black Agency in Memories of Abolition: Human Rights and Slavery Movies.”

Talk Description

“Abolitionism holds a privileged place in human rights historiography. In scholarship and the wider social world, the abolition of slavery has frequently been celebrated as a foundational human rights moment. This celebratory discourse has also impinged on the medium of cinema: slavery films frequently propagate the view that abolition was a ‘gift’ codified in law. In this reductionist discourse, law is configured as the guarantor of freedom and Black resistance to slavery is marginalized. By this strategy, the history of slavery is transfigured into a platform for the celebration of white moral indignation via attention to a canonized set of white patriarchs conceived of as philanthropic, moral crusaders, who are recognizably the forerunners of today’s white saviour ‘human rights heroes.’ However, as we know, Black agency was also a decisive force in bringing Atlantic slavery to an end – most spectacularly in Haiti. Gillo Pontecorvo’s undervalued 1969 film Burn! offers an ideological critique of abolitionism and holds untapped potential for the radicalization of human rights discourse today. Refusing the debilitating narrative that abolition was a legally encoded humanitarian gift, Burn! insists upon Black agency as a central historical force in the story of an as yet incomplete struggle for liberation.”

This is a recording of an October 15, 2024 CNLH-sponsored conversation and Q&A with the editors of The Routledge Handbook of Cultural Legal Studies: Tim Peters, Thomas Giddens and Karen Crawley.

Book Description

“This handbook provides a comprehensive introduction to the cutting-edge field of cultural legal studies. Cultural legal studies is at the forefront of the legal discipline, questioning not only doctrine or social context, but how the concerns of legality are distributed and encountered through a range of material forms. Growing out of the interdisciplinary turn in critical legal studies and jurisprudence that took place in the latter quarter of the 20th century, cultural legal studies exists at the intersection of a range of traditional disciplinary areas: legal studies, cultural studies, literary studies, jurisprudence, media studies, critical theory, history, and philosophy. It is an area of study that is characterised by an expanded or open-ended conception of what ‘counts’ as a legal source, and that is concerned with questions of authority, legitimacy, and interpretation across a wide range of cultural artefacts. Including a mixture of established and new authors in the area, this handbook brings together a complex set of perspectives that are representative of the current field, but which also address its methods, assumptions, limitations, and possible futures.”

Professor John Borrows B.A., M.A., J.D., LL.M. (Toronto), Ph.D. (Osgoode Hall Law School), LL.D. (Hons., Dalhousie, York, SFU, Queen’s & Law Society of Ontario), D.H.L, (Hons., Toronto), D.Litt. (Hons., Waterloo), F.R.S.C., O.C., is the Loveland Chair in Indigenous Law at the University of Toronto Law School. His numerous publications include, Recovering Canada; The Resurgence of Indigenous Law (Donald Smiley Award best book in Canadian Political Science, 2002), and Canada’s Indigenous Constitution (Canadian Law and Society Best Book Award 2011). 

For over 30 years, Professor Borrows has written about the revitalization of Indigenous peoples’ laws, and their relationship to other Canadian Laws. In this talk, Professor Borrows discussed the arc of his writing over this period, through graduate work, sole-authored manuscripts, and edited books. In the process, he considered some of the themes the courts have developed which facilitate and frustrate Indigenous law, and he discussed the role of academic legal writing in addressing these challenges.

Professor Davies is a Matthew Flinders Distinguished Professor at Flinders University (Australia) and the author of numerous books, including Law Unlimited: Materialism, Pluralism, and Legal Theory (2017, Winner of the SLSA Theory and History Book Prize), Property: Meanings, Histories, Theories (2007), and Asking the Law Question (now in its 5th edition).

This is a recording of Professor Davies talk “Turbulent Flow and the Emergence of Planetary Norms,” and draws from her recent book, EcoLaw: Legality, Life and the Normativity of Nature (2022). Background text for this lecture include: the introduction to Ecolaw and ecolaw’s glossary entry in Braidotti, Jones, and Klumbyte eds More Posthuman Glossary.

Mark Antaki

Mark Antaki is Associate Professor and Director of the Paul-André Crépeau Centre for Private and Comparative Law at McGill University. Prof. Antaki is interested in law as a fundamental linguistic human activity and in phenomenological and genealogical approaches to law. He has published on subjects such as the turn to “imagination” in legal theory, the discourses of “values” and “proportionality” in constitutional law, the metaphor of the book in South Africa’s interim constitution, and the role of exemplarity in legal reasoning. He co-edited Sensing the Nation’s Law: Historical Inquiries into the Aesthetics of Democratic Legitimacy (2018),as well as Rationalité pénale et démocratie (2013).  

Rebecca Johnson

Rebecca Johnson is Professor of Law and Associate Director of the Indigenous Law Research Unit at the University of Victoria. Her research interests are marked by interdisciplinary, and include judicial dissent, the economic imaginary, Indigenous legal methodologies, and gender and sexuality. A pioneer in Canadian law-and-film scholarship, she has written on such topics as same-sex family formation, colonialism, the Western, affect and emotion, and Inuit cinema. Her book Taxing Choices: the Intersection of Class, Gender, Parenthood and the Law (2003) won the 2003-2004 Harold Adams Innis Prize for Best English-Language Book in the Social Sciences by the Canadian Federation for Humanities and Social Sciences.  

William MacNeil

William MacNeil is The Honourable John Dowd Chair in Law and Dean of the School of Law and Justice at Southern Cross University (Australia). Born in Canada, Professor MacNeil taught at London School of Economics and the University of Hong Kong prior to emigrating to Australia. Prof. MacNeil is a well-known scholar in the area of jurisprudence and cultural studies. He is the author of Lex Populi: the Jurisprudence of Popular Culture (2007) and of Novel Judgements: Legal Theory as Fiction (2013), which won the Penny Pether Prize for Scholarship in Law, Literature and the Humanities. Most currently he is completing a book on the philosophy of law in science fiction, fantasy and horror.

Panu Minkkinen

Panu Minkkinen is Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Helsinki’s Faculty of Law. Prior to joining the University of Helsinki, Professor Minkkinen worked at the University of Leicester in the UK and the Finnish Institute in London. His research interests include constitutional and political theory, cultural studies, and continental philosophy. He is the author of Thinking without Desire (1999), Sovereignty, Knowledge, Law (2009) and Law as a Human Science (forthcoming in 2021). He has also co-edited Constituent Power: Law, Popular Rule, and Politics (2020).

Jennifer Nedelsky

Jennifer Nedelsky is Professor of Law at the Osgoode Hall School of Law. She was previously Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of Toronto and Professorial Fellow at the Institute for Social Justice. Her teaching and scholarship focus on Feminist Theory, Legal Theory, American Constitutional History and Interpretation, and Comparative Constitutionalism. Her book Law’s Relations: A Relational Theory of Self, Autonomy, and Law (2011) won the C.B. Macpherson Prize, awarded by the Canadian Political Science Association. Her jointly authored manuscript A Care Manifesto: (Part) Time for All is forthcoming.

Scott Veitch

Scott Veitch is the Paul KC Chung Professor in Jurisprudence at the University of Hong Kong. His work focuses on the ways that legal theory interacts with politics, society, and history, and his forthcoming book Obligations: New Trajectories in Law (in print) deals with the implications of organizing society along an obligations-based approach. He is the author of Law and Irresponsibility: On the Legitimation of Human Suffering (2007) and Moral Conflict and Legal Reasoning (1999), which was the winner of the European Award for Legal Theory. Professor Veitch also co-edited Jurisprudence: Themes and Concepts, which is now in its third edition.

James Boyd White

James Boyd White is Hart Wright Professor of Law (emeritus) and Professor of English (emeritus) at the University of Michigan. Prior to that, he taught at the University of Colorado and the University of Chicago. His seminal book The Legal Imagination (1973) is widely credited with having founded the interdisciplinary field of Law and Literature. J.B. White has published many influential books, including When Words Lose their Meaning (1984), Heracles’ Bow (1985), Justice as Translation (1990), Acts of Hope (1994), The Edge of Meaning (2001), and Living Speech (2006). His most recent book is Keep Law Alive (2019).