C.IAS Lecture - Julia Roth

Abstract:

The critical depiction of legal imaginaries in texts such as Mohameodu Ould Slahi’s the Guantánamo Diary illustrate how legal norms are marked by cultural-historical contexts and biases. Against this backdrop, the talk traces how legal classifications draw on problematic, but unquestioned, sociocultural categories and configurations, and it delineates the role literary and cultural representations play in producing and consolidating, but also in interrogating, such configurations from a feminist and postcolonial perspective. Making reference to the long trajectory of textual/cultural interventions that have challenged hegemonic notions and configurations of legal discourse and the rule of law by those excluded from, oppressed or delegitimized by them, it argues that a focus on Law and Culture helps to de-naturalize the authority of legal categories, assumptions, and hierarchies and to contribute to alternative visions of the future. The talk discusses a number of exemplary literary, testimonial and artistic practices related to rights and delineates the ways in which they contribute to the critical analysis of the different (legal) imaginaries and affective mobilisations (of what feels right). Finally, the talk will zoom in on he current polarized scenario in which retrogressive forces increasingly contest human rights and the rule of law, in which many appropriate the language of freedom of law for their anti-pluralist re-framings. It will thus finally argue for a “ruthless” take on the law: that is, a practical commitment to existing legal norms and tools as a starting point for the fight for equality and defence of emancipatory and pluralist legal framings.

Bio:

Julia Roth is currently teaching American Studies at Bielefeld University, where she is also director of the Center for Interamerican Studies (CIAS) and PI at the DFG Graduate School “Experiencing Gender”. Previously, she was Professor of American Studies with a focus on Gender Studies and Inter-American Studies in Bielefeld and postdoctoral fellow in the research project "The Americas as Space of Entanglements" in Bielefeld and in the interdisciplinary network "desiguALdades.net - Interdependent Inequalities in Latin America" at Freie Universität Berlin. She was well as a lecturer at Humboldt-Universität Berlin, Universität Potsdam, and Universidad de Guadalajara, Mexico snd La Plata, Argentina. Her research focuses on postcolonial, decolonial and gender approaches, intersectionality and global inequalities, anti-racist feminist knowledge from the Caribbean and the Americas, Hip Hop and social transformation, gender and genre, law and literature and legal imaginaries, gender and citizenship, and right-wing populism and gender. In addition to her academic work, she co-/organizes and -curates cultural and political events.