Critical Analysis of Law Workshop Series
presents
Elizabeth Anker
Cornell University
South African Constitutionalism and the Architecture of the Nation
Tuesday, September 19, 2017
12:30 – 2:00
Solarium (Room FA2), Falconer Hall
84 Queen’s Park
Perhaps no legal form carries greater contemporary authority than that of the constitution. Constitutions gain popular and official support through a number of recurring metaphors—the body politic, architecture, writing, and the living tree. These metaphors guide judicial reasoning; represent powerful symbols for the nation; and enable literary and cultural texts to imaginatively contemplate the nature of constitutionalism. This paper examines the widespread tendency to represent the post-apartheid South African Constitution as a domicile, site of building, or larger architectural structure, imagery that informs a number of post-apartheid memorials and other cultural sites. In addition, that symbolism is deployed in a series of recent novels that critique the nation’s transition beyond apartheid. While the architectural metaphor for the Constitution has helped to foster public reconciliation, I examine how it also enacts forms of property redistribution that were absent from South African recovery, casting that process as a success story.
Elizabeth S. Anker is Associate Professor of English and Associate Member of the Faculty of Law at Cornell University. Her first book is Fictions of Dignity: Embodying Human Rights in World Literature (2012), and she has published widely on the relationship between literature and art and different legal or political constructs: animal rights, sovereignty, international law, constitutionalism, and democracy. She has also co-edited the collections Critique and Postcritique (with Rita Felski; Duke 2017) and New Directions in Law and Literature (with Bernadette Meyler; Oxford 2017). She is currently working on two books: On Paradox: Theory and the Story of Rights and Our Constitutional Metaphors: Law, Culture, and the Management of Crisis. She edits the new book series “Corpus Juris: The Humanities in Politics and Law” with Cornell University Press
A light lunch will be provided.
For more workshop information, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca