Appropriation is an undertheorized concept, despite its long and complex history. Contemporary struggles over data theft, land dispossession, cultural appropriation, or economic exploitation underscore how varied and ubiquitous appropriative practices have become. At its core, appropriation describes the act of taking exclusive possession of a thing, object, body, idea, or text that did not originally belong to the appropriator. It is therefore deeply entangled with the idea of property. And as Hardt and Negri (2009) remind us, “the concept of property and the defense of property remain the foundation of every modern political constitution” (21). Yet appropriation can also unsettle the sanctity of property: it can name acts of reclaiming what has been stolen, dispossessing the possessor, and return property back to what Hardt and Negri call the common.

This panel explores appropriation not only as a mechanism of domination but also as a strategy of resistance. We invite papers that theorize appropriation as a literary, aesthetic, political, or epistemic practice; that examine its ambivalent role in producing both oppression and liberation; or that analyze how appropriative acts reshape notions of authorship, identity, embodiment, and collective belonging. While literary appropriation is one important dimension, we aim to engage appropriation as a broader political and cultural concept whose implications exceed any single disciplinary frame.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Literary Methods: How writers borrow, steal, remix, or inhabit other voices, genres, or archives; how intertextuality, parody, pastiche, and adaptation function as appropriative practices.
• Authorship: How claims to originality, ownership, and intellectual property structure literary production; how marginalized writers challenge or refuse these regimes.
• Epistemic Appropriation: How knowledge systems, scientific, religious, philosophical, are taken over, repurposed, or weaponized.
• Colonialism: How colonial subjects resist the ownership of land and regulation of their bodies by colonizers.
• Racism: How anti‑ or counter‑racist movements dispossess white supremacist claims over bodies, narratives, and cultural meaning.
• Gender & Sexuality: How feminist, queer, and trans movements reclaim bodily autonomy and resist appropriative forms of gendered and sexual control.
• Economic Struggles: How exploited and alienated peoples and classes resist the appropriation of labor and reclaim their bodies against capitalist extraction, and how to establish the common.

We encourage comparative and interdisciplinary approaches that bring together literary studies, intellectual history, cultural history, critical theory, and related fields.

For questions or more information, please contact the organizers at [email protected]