Apr
13
2017
OSI
The second workshop we want to introduce this week will deal with a variety of questions on claims to/of heritage and their implications. Workshop 2 “Claiming the Past, Belonging for the Future” will be convened by Marianne Constable and Leti Volpp. This is their abstract for this workshop:
Heritage, heredity, and inheritance all come from the past and yet their claims are not simply historical. Indeed, as present-day acts, claims of heritage set up what belongs to whom for the future. What kinds of claims are these? Are they distinct as claims? What is it to make or state or stake a claim? How are legal claims performed? What do claims, as speech acts, involve? Does every claim involve an assertion of fact plus a demand for recognition? When are claims as to heritage factual? When are they claims of law? To what do they appeal? And what sort of evidence do they call for? How does what counts as evidence of a particular claim change over time?
Drawing in part on the work of J. L. Austin on speech acts and referring to a small number of documents drawn from various legal contexts — particular statutes, local regulations, trial transcripts, and possibly UN documents — we’ll begin to touch on the complexity of these issues as they relate to cultural heritage and historic preservation. Readings will include scholarship about the 20th-century legal history of archeology and about encounters between different traditions.
Apr
12
2017
OSI
As we just posted information on our first convener, Sabine N. Meyer, today we want to introduce her co-convener in Workshop 3 “Real and Performative Properties: Competing Claims to Citizenship, Indigeneity, and Land,” Beth Piatote. She is associate professor of Native American Studies, and affiliated faculty in the Department of Linguistics and the American Studies program at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests include Native American/Aboriginal literature and federal Indian law in the United States and Canada, American literature, and Nez Perce language and literature.
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Apr
11
2017
OSI
As the first convener in this series, we would like to introduce Osnabrück’s own Sabine N. Meyer. Together with Beth Piatote she will convene Workshop 3 “Real and Performative Properties: Competing Claims to Citizenship, Indigeneity, and Land.” Currently, she is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the Institute of English and American Studies at Osnabrück University, Germany. Between April 2015 and March 2016, she was also a fellow at the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities “Law as Culture” at Bonn.
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Apr
10
2017
OSI
Starting this week, we will begin posting more information about the individual workshops and the conveners. We begin with Workshop 3 “Real and Performative Properties: Competing Claims to Citizenship, Indigeneity, and Land” with Beth Piatote and Sabine N. Meyer. Here is the introduction of their workshop at OSI 2017:
Scholars from various disciplines have long asserted the central role of property in the colonization of the North American continent and the emergence of the United States. The transformation of indigenous lands into private and federal property has been identified as a foundational aspect of American empire-building. Not surprisingly, debates about real property – land – dominated the relationship between Native Americans and the settler nation, particularly in the nineteenth century, in the context of the federal policies of removal and allotment. While the struggle over real property remains the bedrock of Native-settler relations, as the Standing Rock protests demonstrate, it has also generated conflicts over other, more metaphorical “properties,” such as the properties of citizenship (both tribal and U.S. citizenship) and indigeneity as such.
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