Tuesday, September 19, 2017 - 12:30pm to Wednesday, September 20, 2017 - 12:55pm
Location: 
Solarium (room FA2), Falconer Hall, 84 Queen's Park

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