FALL 2023

Personhood

What defines and delimits the parameters of personhood?  How has the shifting legal status of personhood been instrumentalized to grant, as well as to deny, rights and recognition to human and non-human subjects past and present? Deriving from the Latin root persona, meaning “mask, character, role,” the fictive dimension of personhood is integral to the longue durée of its cultural lives and historical legacies. Colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade constructed legal fictions about enslaved peoples of African descent and “indios” as non- (or not full) persons, which continue to shape the world today. This semester’s theme invites inquiries into the changing contours and erasures of personhood past, present, and future from across the disciplines, including but not limited to:  studies of anti-Black negations of personhood (and of the juridical fictions and systems of representation that subtend them); environmental personhood (such as the successful advocacy in 2017 by Māori in New Zealand to extend personhood to the Whanganui River as part of ongoing struggles for indigenous recognition, and Bangladesh’s recent granting of personhood to the country’s rivers to mitigate industrial pollution); the contested personhood of non-human animals (such as the Bronx Zoo’s “Happy” the elephant, recently denied legal personhood); the effects of corporate personhood in the wake of Citizens United; the pitting of fetal personhood against pregnant people’s reproductive rights; and the futures of personhood in light of advances in artificial intelligence. How have scholars, artists, writers, and activists engaged with the changing scope of human and non-human personhood?

Lectures 

All lectures begin at 6 p.m. unless otherwise noted.  Locations vary by date.