WSU - Humanities

Congratulations to these Faculty Fellows, who were selected in the spring of 2007. They will present papers at the Fellows Conference in the spring of 2008.

Thomas Abowd
Assistant Professor, Anthropology
Laws of the Land

Denver Brunsman
Assistant Professor, History
The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World

Ollie Johnson
Assistant Professor, Africana Studies
Affirmative Action and Racial Justice in Brazil

Christopher Peters
Associate Professor, Law
A Matter of Dispute: Law, Democracy, and Disagreement in America

Brad Roth
Associate Professor, Political Science and Law
Sovereign Equality and Moral Disagreement

May Seikaly
Chair of Near Eastern and Asian Studies
Women Usher in Waves of Change in the Arabian Gulf

EXPLICATION:
The notions of sovereignty, law, and justice can provide frames of analyses in a variety of humanities and arts disciplines, including literature, religion, history, music, theatre, philosophy and art. Thus, the Humanities Center is inviting full time WSU humanities and art faculty to submit proposals to its 2007 Faculty Fellowships Competition on the theme “Sovereignty, Justice and the Law”.

The relationship between sovereignty, law, and justice is, of course, an ancient concern, but it has been receiving significant academic attention across disciplines for the last twenty years or so, much of it organized around a surprising reconsideration of Carl Schmitt’s treatment of “political theology.” (Schmitt was the conservative Catholic jurist who became the legal architect of National Socialism by drafting Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, concerning the state of emergency – the Nazi regime was “legal” under this article, operating as a sovereign power in a “state of emergency,” one that lasted some twelve years). Schmitt was interested in the sovereign as the body that makes possible a particular juridical-political order through an initial act of force or violence before withdrawing to allow governance by the “law” of that particular juridical-political order. The sovereign is thus both inside and outside the law, located in an extra-legal sphere, occupying what Giorgio Agamben refers to as a “zone of indistinction” between the law and pure, political violence or force. The sovereign is thus, in some sense, an “exception” to the rule of law, capable in states of emergency when the law is suspended for some reason, of making law or, at least “decisions,” without the law. Modern democratic nation-states have tended to avoid or ignore the problem of sovereignty as Schmitt frames it in their own governments, and, for the most part, post-WWII, were able to do so. But the end of the twentieth-century has produced more and more “states of emergency” or “states of crisis” that make the problem of the sovereign exception increasingly visible and impossible to ignore, revealing the fragility of cherished and seemingly foundational concepts like democracy and citizenship. During the Katrina hurricane and flooding, for example, modern “citizens” can quickly become “refugees”, without rights or privileges, at the mercy of the sovereign power. Other questions have emerged that highlight the persistent paradoxes of sovereignty and its relationship to law and justice:

To what authority, outside the law, does one appeal when a democratic presidential race ends in a virtual tie?
To what authority does one appeal to judge disputes between two “sovereign” states, including democratically elected sovereign states?
What political relations are possible when large groups of people do not respect or adhere to the boundaries and logics of sovereign nation-states, appealing, for example, to a higher “sovereign” either in the form of a deity or an imagined political entity?
Is there a legitimate distinction between the violence that founds and sustains a democratic sovereign state and other acts of political violence?

Implied in all of these questions is a sense that justice, or a just system, exists somewhere. Ultimately, however, this sense of “justice” that operates in the background of so many political and legal discussions is nowhere to be found in concrete terms or actions. We have no “justice” without law, but no law without the sovereign: and the sovereign is violent, but not necessarily just. How then do we talk in a rigorous and scholarly way about justice? Indeed, a sense of justice drives and informs much academic work in the humanities and while that sense of justice is often experienced and invoked, it is rarely examined. The paradox of the sovereign provides a focused way to address justice. While many of these questions seemingly point toward specific disciplines in the humanities – law, political science, history, philosophy – the troublesome logic of the relationship between sovereign, law, and justice is certainly not limited to just the legal and political sphere. For example, the so-called “laws” governing creative activity in the arts are frequently suspended by the “sovereign” decision of the artist in the pursuit of a more perfect (just?) form. The competition is particularly interested in how the dynamic relationship between sovereignty, law and justice manifests itself across the disciplines and enthusiastically invites contributions from all forms of humanities scholarship and artistic practice.

The above explication is intended to be suggestive rather than exhaustive. The Humanities Center invites applications from all humanities and arts faculty who are interested in the topic “sovereignty, justice and the law” from any disciplinary or interdisciplinary perspective.