The Littoral of Law and Poetics
Sora Han
African American Studies
UC Irvine
Participants
Charisse Pearlina Weston
Artist and Writer
J. Kameron Carter
Religious Studies
Indiana University, Bloomington
Jos Charles
Poet
UC Irvine
Colin Dayan
English and Law
Vanderbilt University
Laura Harris
Cinema Studies
New York University
Roshanak Kheshti
Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies
UC Berkeley
Raina León
Poet
Philadelphia, PA
David Lloyd
English
UC Riverside
Layli Long Soldier
Poet, Oglala Lakota Nation
Santa Fe, NM
Salar Mameni
Ethnic Studies
UC Berkeley
Fred Moten
Performance Studies
New York University
Yen Noh
BAK, basis voor actuele kunst
Utrecht, Netherlands
M. NourbeSe Philip
Poet
Toronto, Canada
“The Littoral of Law and Poetics” stages a confrontation between law and poetry in the expansiveness of the oceans. Jacques Lacan’s notion of “lituraterre” places the writing of literary criticism in littoral borders, which contributors will render from coastal and ocean law into poetic and multimedia art forms. Poetic justice is the actual breaking and cutting of law’s written sentences as grammatical structure and state-enforced adjudication. It is also the new associative possibilities that become thinkable between such fragments when curated away from the order of a sentence’s meaning, and toward a sociality of marks that unconsciously express our freedom to “consent not to be a single being” (Moten). This series brings together poets, scholars, and artists to produce multimedia thought pieces which materialize poetic justice through written, visual, and sonic forms from contributors’ respective littoral horizons. To name these water-marked borders – California, Ireland, Brazil, Arkansas, Korea, Iran, Barbados and more – is only to invite the differently blurring coastal or riparian lines from which we know and insist on our oceanic indivisibility in the face of crises of massive proportions produced by enduring legal forms of slavery and settler colonialism.
