As Oren Izenberg illustrates in On Being Numerous (2011), theories of poetry have long engaged personhood. Yet it is within the context of “our century’s extreme failures to value persons adequately—or even to perceive persons as persons” that a number of poets have come to understand poetry as “an ontological project: a civilizational wish to reground the concept and the value of the person.” While panelists will work from an archive of poetry distinct from Izenberg’s, their presentations will underline his observations of what is at stake for poets who use the genre to learn more about the very being of persons. Tracking poets as they wrestle with the destructive forces of slavery, genocide, colonization, dispossession, and ecological disaster, panelists will inquire whom personhood serves, where and how it becomes distinct from citizenship, where and how it becomes distinct from human being, and how it should or should not be mobilized in current discussions of (im)migrants’, workers’, and women’s rights. As such, in addition to engaging scholarship on poetry, several presenters will draw on the work of political theorists including Linda Bosniak and Wendy Brown, as well as recent critiques of liberal humanism.
Keeping in mind Barbara Johnson’s insight that (lyric) poetry might play a role in providing legislators with “the assumption that the human has been or can be defined,” presentations will also engage the way that poems as cultural artifacts can become available as evidence of personhood to legal practitioners. In its engagement with historical and contemporary political concerns, the special session will contribute to a recent resurgence of scholarship on poetry’s intersections with law, evidenced by several essays in Elizabeth Anker and Bernadette Meyler’s New Directions in Law and Literature (2017) and in Sophia A. McClennen and Alexandra Schultheis Moore’s Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights (2015), as well as by Sarah Dowling’s monograph Translingual Poetics: Writing Personhood Under Settler Colonialism (2018) and a 2017 issue of Amerikastudien devoted to poetry and law.
To initiate our special session, Katherine Gilbert will bring our attention to the inequivalence of personhood and human being through a reading of Robert Browning’s 1864 poem “Caliban upon Setebos.” Drawing on her scholarly expertise in Victorian law and literature, Dr. Gilbert will theorize the dramatic monologue as having things in common with legal testimony, both in structure and intent, and illustrate how the absence of listeners in “Caliban upon Setebos” suggests that Caliban is isolated not only in literal ways, but also not heard in legal contexts where he attempts to gather evidence to understand his personhood and humanity. Further, attending to first- and third-person pronouns in Caliban’s “speech,” Gilbert will show how Caliban allegorically internalizes socio-legal claims that suggest he is not fully human.
If Gilbert’s paper situates Browning’s poem as one that both responds to and anticipates the effects of social Darwinism on English common law and criminal law, Ann Keniston’s paper will approach the legacies of English law from another perspective. Dr. Keniston will focus on M. NourbeSe Philip’s 2008 book Zong!, which recombines words and letters from the 1783 legal decision Gregson v. Gilbert, which concerned insurance compensation following the deliberate drowning of slaves aboard the Zong slaveship. Distinguishing her analysis from other readings that understand Zong! as an attempt to restore personhood to nonhuman cargo, Keniston will show how the book problematizes the concept of personhood as Philip emphasizes the linguistic and spatial structures that prevent her from imagining or reviving the enslaved persons aboard the ship. This talk will conclude by noting how the poem’s ambivalence about the status of personhood evokes current discussions of immigrant and workers’ personhood and rights, and interrogates the status—and the advisability—of the very concept of personhood.
Further developing the questions of humanity and nation that Keniston’s scholarship raises, in “Paper After Nation,” José Alvergue will read Divya Victor’s Kith (2017) to map out a poetic alternative to the ethno-racial triangulation of citizenship known as naturalization. With the book as touchstone, he will trace the history of naturalization through its humanist origins in Bartolomé de las Casas’s “In Defense of the Indians,” its American application in the Dred Scott decision, and in various 20th-century reanimations. In place of these authoritarian, racialist contexts for recognizing status and profiling immigrant affects towards the bestowal of national status, Dr. Alvergue will argue that Victor’s poetic relation of “kith” simultaneously underscores the triangulation of the nationally vulnerable while providing an epistemological and rational historicity to concepts of the “person” against definitions of citizenship.
Finally, award-winning poet Brenda Shaughnessy will frame and then present a poetic inquiry into the nature of personhood—also asking after the relationship between rights and personhood, and in particular, whether women qualify within that rubric. In her presentation, she will draw from her recently published book The Octopus Museum, which imagines—in legal inquiries, poems, prose vignettes, and invented documents—that these texts are exhibits in a newly-created museum of humanity, built and curated by octopodes, the new dominant species on Earth.
Talia Shalev will preside over the session, strictly enforcing 15-minute presentation time limits and providing printed copies of presenters’ bios so as to leave maximum time for presentations and discussion.