Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law

As the last contributor to our lecture series of this year’s Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law, we are happy to announce Richard Perry. Prof. Perry will speak on “A Law of Natures, Nations, Nativs, and Narratives” on Thursday, 14 August 2014, at 9.30 am in room 11/212. Richard Perry is Lecturer-in-Residence and Senior Fellow in Legal Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also Professor of Justice Studies at San Jose State University. His research currently focuses on questions of temporal ordering after the alleged end of history.

Abstract:

It is generally recognized that legal rights claims – whether private property rights, collective-cultural rights, or even the jus cogens of human rights claims – are speech acts that may “do things with words” by virtue of their illocutionary force that is made explicit in the lexical-grammatical forms in which they are uttered and as that force is rendered performatively intelligible against the background of the canonical discourse genre of “Narrating the Nation” (Bhabha 1990).

This presentation will reflect on Judith Butler’s recent accounts of performativity in politico-legal discourse (in Who Sings the Nation-State? with Spivak 2007, and in Dispossession: The Performative in the Political with Athanasiou 2013). Primary data considered will include legal cases from Calvin’s Case (1608) to the present time, as well as other materials. The audience is hereby cautioned that media may be mixed in your presence.

We are happy to announce the keynote lecture of this year’s Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law on Friday, August 8, at 7 p.m. in room 11/212. Prof. Leti Volpp will speak on “The Indigenous as Alien – The Settler Contract and a Nation of Immigrants.” Together with the mayoral reception in Osnabrück’s city hall prior to the lecture, Volpp’s keynote address constitutes the official opening of the 2014 OSI.

Leti Volpp is Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law in Access to Justice, University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on citizenship, migration, culture, gender, and identity.

Abstract: Immigration law, as it is taught, studied, and researched in the United States, imagines away the fact of preexisting indigenous populations. Why is this the case?  I argue, first, that this elision reflects and reproduces how the field narrates space, time, and membership. But despite this disappearance from the field, Indians have figured in immigration law, and thus, to understand what this has meant for indigenous populations, I describe the neglected legal history of the treatment of American Indians under U.S. immigration and citizenship law. I then return to explain why Indians have disappeared from immigration law through an investigation of the relationship between We the People, the “settler contract,” and the “nation of immigrants.”