The Person in Law & Culture

The person is one of Western culture’s most enduring legal and literary forms. According to the origin story recounted by everyone from Thomas Hobbes to Hannah Arendt to Roberto Esposito, the Latin persona comes to us from Greek drama by way of Roman law. The Greek prósōpon (πρόσωπον) refers to the helmet-style mask an actor wore to assume a particular character type: father, son, slave, soldier, maiden, courtesan, and so on. Novelists and playwrights recall this usage when they provide a list of characters under the heading dramatis personae, or “masks of the drama.” In law as in theater, persona designates a particular character or role, which can be played by any number of actors. Like their literary counterparts, legal characters serve to order social relations. In drama, literature, film, video games, and social media, we understand character as a cultural artifact, even when it has a real-life referent, as in autobiography and other nonfiction genres. Yet, thanks to Patristic and medieval Christianity’s corporealization and metaphysicalization of persona, many today balk at viewing law’s person in such formal terms. Person’s referent, they insist, is the embodied human being: “person” denotes the actor, not the mask.

The new formalism, combined with decolonial, anti-racist, Indigenous, Afro-diasporic, Latinx, feminist, queer, trans, migration, environmental, disability studies, and STEM scholarship on biopolitics, (post-)humanism, and the Anthropocene invites a reconsideration of the relationships among law’s person, literary character, and the human. The following are just some of the many topics seminar papers might address:

What are the political stakes of viewing the subjects of antislavery or human rights literature as human beings rather than literary artifacts?
What does it mean to think of the person as a fiction rather than a function of law or literature?
To what end do legal or cultural texts envision persons and humans in complementary or even dialectical terms?
How do cultural texts engage ongoing debates over the legal personhood of corporations, fetuses, embryos, rivers, elephants, whales, and apes?
Which genres or works preempt or dislodge character – and to what end?
How do everyday people assume or reject legal or literary personae to pursue their own political, social, or economic interests?
How do non-Western legal and cultural traditions construct their subjects?
How does law’s person and literary character (or the relations between the two) change over time and across cultures?
How does performance theory and/or practice complicate our understanding of person’s past, present, and future?

We encourage papers that help us to think in even more unpredictable ways about law, literature, and the subjects through which they produce their meanings.
NB: 3rd co-organizer: Laura Zander, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Osnabrück University  <[email protected]>