Spring 2025 Joint Legal Studies Seminar: “‘THE LOST UNITY OF SOCIAL LIFE’: LAW AND LITERATURE IN THE WORLD-SYSTEM”

[Arts Communications]

Hello, everyone!
Please join us for the Spring 2025 Joint University of Waterloo–St. Jerome’s University Legal Studies Seminar:
 On Thursday the 26th of June, 2025 at 1 p.m. EDT, Dr. Philip Kaisary will be speaking on the topic of
“‘THE LOST UNITY OF SOCIAL LIFE’: LAW AND LITERATURE IN THE WORLD-SYSTEM”

via Zoom (register here<https://uwaterloo.zoom.us/meeting/register/q07QSLi_R02ZXgYwH3f0Zg>).

About the talk:

 When it emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, the interdisciplinary field of Law and Literature cast itself as a “movement.”  However, the radicalness and political praxis implicit in the rhetoric of a “movement” promised more than the field could deliver.  The field’s eschewal of historicized and materialist hermeneutic methods resulted in a field ill-equipped to respond to the conundrum of the coexistence of bourgeois democratic legal norms with the unevenness, inequality, terror, and violence of the modern capitalist world-system.  This context provides this paper with its point of departure which can be conceived of as a thought experiment: What if Fredric Jameson’s landmark text, The Political Unconscious, first published in 1981, not James Boyd White’s The Legal Imagination, were Law and Literature’s foundational text?  Considering Jameson’s The Political Unconscious as a text that offers a compelling but as yet untaken path for Law and Literature scholarship, this paper begins the theoretical work of developing a materialist and worldly approach to Law and Literature.  Following Fredric Jameson, my aim is to “restore, at least methodologically, the lost unity of social life,” to demonstrate that such “widely distant elements of the social totality” as law and literature “are ultimately part of the same global historical process.”

About the speaker:
Dr. Philip Kaisary is the 2023–25 Ruth and Mark Phillips Professor in Cultural Mediations and an Associate Professor in the Department of Law and Legal Studies, the Department of English Language and Literature, and the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. He is the author of From Havana to Hollywood: Slave Resistance in the Cinematic Imaginary (SUNY Press, 2024) and The Haitian Revolution in the Literary Imagination: Radical Horizons, Conservative Constraints (University of Virginia Press, 2014).  Effective July 1, 2025, he will be Professor of Law and Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Carleton University. He is currently at work on a new book project titled, Worlding Law and Literature: A Materialist Critique and Reconstruction, which is forthcoming with Palgrave in their New Comparisons in World Literature series.
About the seminar series:
The Joint Legal Studies Seminar Series features biannual seminars showcasing a range of legal studies scholarship. The series is hosted by the Departments of Sociology and Legal Studies at the University of Waterloo and St. Jerome’s University.
For more information:
Please contact Drs. Honor Brabazon (honor.brabazon at uwaterloo.ca<mailto:honor.brabazon at uwaterloo.ca>), Allison Chenier (achenier at uwaterloo.ca<mailto:achenier at uwaterloo.ca>), and Andrea Quinlan (andrea.quinlan at uwaterloo.ca<mailto:andrea.quinlan at uwaterloo.ca>) with any questions.
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