Our panel considers these various issues in four different but related realms, specifically in relation to the status of so-called non-persons. As the philosopher Charles W. Mills wrote, “historically and still currently, most humans were not and are not socially recognized persons, or, more neatly and epigrammatically put: most persons are non-persons.” The four panelists consider the status of non-persons historically and conceptually as well as formally and legally. In particular, these papers consider the contested category of legal non-persons both theoretically and through historical case studies that involve the figure of the denizen, the military spouse, and the refugee.
Stephanie Hershinow’s paper, “Personal Effects: Legal and Literary Personhood in the Early Novel,” addresses the dialectic of personhood in eighteenth-century fiction. Nonpersons abound in the early novel: adolescents, but also married women; animals, objects, criminals, and the enslaved. Rare is the novelistic protagonist who enjoys full, recognized legal personhood. Why would that be the case? One answer is that personhood was—historically as well as on the page—a rare status. Drawing on examples from Daniel Defoe, Hershinow uses the figure of the human nonperson to test the overlap of literary and legal personhood.
Juan Meneses continues this exploration of nonpersons through the figure of the denizen, in his paper "Eroded Citizenship: The Figure of the Denizen in J. M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K." Specifically, he calls for an examination of the figure of the denizen as the foreign subject who enjoyed limited but specified rights, codifying a form of belonging that retained a degree of both alienness and alienation. Engaging with Roberto Esposito’s theory of the impolitical and Rancière’s notion of “those who have no part,” Meneses analyzes the struggle of the protagonist of J. M. Coetzee’s novel Life & Times of Michael K to negotiate a form of personhood between the restrictive world of militarized law and the naturalized world of individual desire.
Deborah Cohler’s paper “What is a Military Spouse?” considers militarized law from a different perspective, analyzing the status of personhood and gendered citizenship in memoirs written by U.S. military spouses. Observing that service members sign away a slate of legal rights when they enter the military, she argues that this process renders a unique constellation of nonpersonhood: military spouses are both insiders and outsiders, non-service members subject to military control of their personhood. Examining a suite of memoirs by U.S. military spouses written during the “Forever Wars” of the twenty-first century, Kohler shows how, in the attempt to represent this nonpersonhood, these narratives at once deploy and disclose the limits of a wide range of twenty-first century narratives of selfhood: the ideology of liberal self-reliance, the logics of post-feminist empowerment, fables of neo-liberality, the communism of the barracks.
Finally, Angela Naimou’s paper, "The Person in Refuge," reflects on the relationship between the legal person and the concept of refuge in international law. It reads historical and legal documents such as the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees in relation to Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail (published in Arabic in 2017 and in English translation in 2020), a short novel centered on a woman in Ramallah who sets out to investigate the historical 1949 assault and killing of a young Bedouin girl in the Negev desert. Asking how the novel reframes the politics of protection in international law from British mandatory Palestine to the occupied territories, the paper proposes to consider how the legal person affirms and confounds political visions of humanity.
In order to accommodate discussion, each of the four panelists will be held to a strict 15 minute time limit.