About the project
Rights are always conceived – positively or negatively – against the background of national, ethnic, or international communities. Since the groundbreaking work of Benedict Anderson, these kinds of social structures have often been conceived of as imagined communities, that is, as communities bound together by imaginative structures such as metaphor, symbolism, and narrative.
Much of the existing discourse on national and extranational communities sees them as dependent on imaginative and linguistic structures that they share in common with works of literature.
The project investigated these structures, and explored the ways in which literature frames conceptions of rights, including the way that literary texts make visible the connections between modes of imagining social belonging and modes of securing and apportioning rights.
Literature, Rights, and Imagined Communities studied the relationship between conceptions and practices of rights, forms and habits of imagining community, and the structure and practice of literature.
The project’s approach was a broad one, both historically, stretching from the Renaissance and early modern period to the present, and conceptually, examining the notion of rights from a number of different political, intellectual, and gendered perspectives.
Objectives
We were interested in the relationship between literature in English and broad conceptions of human rights, intellectual rights and copyright, civil rights, biopolitics, and posthumanist critiques of rights discourse.
Our research looked at the interaction between literature and rights across a broad spectrum, including considerations of civil rights, property rights, animal rights, human rights, and intellectual rights and copyright.
Our research considered these relationships in light of the way literature interrogates and shapes different forms of imagined communities. We paid special attention to questions of inclusion and diversity, both critiquing the exclusions at work in traditional assignations of rights and investigating the way in which more expansive communities of rights can be built on shared environmental, social, and cultural concerns.
The research group surmounted traditional disciplinary academic boundaries by coupling literary studies with topics and methodologies drawn from the research group’s fields of expertise, including cultural studies and critical theory; African American studies; women’s and gender studies; animal and animality studies; rhetoric and communication; book history and the “imagined communities” of authors, printers, booksellers, and consumers in the literary marketplaces in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries.
Events
Black Poesis III: What makes a hiphop classic? With Marcyliena Morgan (Harvard)
Marcyliena Morgan is the founder and Executive Director of the Hiphop Archive. Organized by Louisa Olufsen Layne in the research group Literature, Rights, and Imagined Communities. Funded by Fritt Ord.
Time and place: Nov. 25, 2019 5:30 PM – 7:00 PM, Nasjonalbiblioteket i Oslo
Professor Marcyliena Morgan is the founder and director of The Hip Hop Archive and Research Institute at Harvard University, established in 2002. She will talk about “Classic Crates,” a new archive collection in the Harvard university library comprising the 200 most important hiphop albums. But what are the main criteria for selecting these albums? And what, if anything, can the canonization of hiphop in the academe tell us about the aesthetic taste and values in society at large?
Open talk, panel, and audience q&a.
Panelists: Øyvind Holen (author and hip hop journalist), Stan Hawkins (Professor of Musicology, UiO), Michelle Tisdel (Research Librarian at the National Library)
Black Poesis II: Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) versus the American Constitution. With Lloyd Pratt (Oxford)
Talk, panel and q&a with Lloyd Pratt, organized by Louisa Olufsen Layne in the research group Literature, Rights, and Imagined Communities. Funded by Fritt Ord. Free entry!
Time and place: Oct. 29, 2019 4:15 PM – 5:30 PM, University Library, Ground Floor, Georg Sverdrups Hus, Blindern
Lloyd Pratt: "Race, Plain Reading, and Frederick Douglass's Constitution"
Frederick Douglass's disagreements with white abolitionists over the content and meaning of the US Constitution and its relation to racial slavery marked a turning point in his intellectual and political career. These disagreements pivoted on what Douglass called his "plain reading" of the Constitution.
This lecture considers how Douglass's account of plain reading fits with his investment in rhetorical play elsewhere in his public discourse. It also examines how the relative inattention to African American intellectual history in recent calls for new modes of reading in the humanities has undersold the complexity of African American thinking on the relation of reading to politics.
Frederick Douglass is best known today for his autobiographical "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass", "An American Slave", "Written by Himself" (1845).
Lloyd Pratt is Drue Heinz Professor of American Literature and Fellow of St John's College at University of Oxford.
Black Poesis: Linton Kwesi Johnson (UK) on poetry and reggae
Linton Kwesi Johnson is a leading figure in British, Caribbean and World literature - and a legendary reggae artist. How do these two combine in his writing?
This event will give Norwegian audiences a special opportunity to hear Linton Kwesi Johnson read his poetry and discuss his unique perspective on the relationship between music and poetry.
Organized by Louisa Olufsen Layne, Literature, Rights, and Imagined Communities. Funded by Fritt Ord and Anders Jahre Foundation.
Time and place: Apr. 12, 2019 6:00 PM, Litteraturhuset
This is the first event in the new Black Poesis series. The live conversation will be hosted by Postdoctoral Research Fellow Louisa Olufsen Layne and Associate Professor Bruce Barnhart.
Johnson is one of only two contemporary poets included in the Penguin Modern Classics series. He writes poetry based on spoken Jamaican English, with strong influences from reggae music. He has invented the term “bass culture” to describe how reggae, and especially its distinct bass sound, represents an aesthetics that combines musical, historical, political and poetic elements.
Johnson has been awarded the Golden Pen Award, the Musgrave Medal for distinguished eminence in the field of poetry, the Order of Distinction from Jamaica, and numerous other awards. He has recorded over 15 albums and sold more than 2 million records.
Johnson was born in 1952 in Chapelton, Jamaica and moved to London at the age of 11. Johnson joined the Black Panthers’ youth section in 1970, and helped the movement organize poetry workshops with a group of musicians and poets called Rasta Love. He also studied for a sociology degree at Goldsmiths College, University of London, where he became an Honorary fellow in 2004. In 1974, Johnson joined the collective Race Today, a political magazine established in 1969 by the Institute of Race Relations. The magazine was one of the most influential organs addressing black politics in Britain in the 1970s, and Johnson later became its arts editor.
His first volume of poems, "Voices of the Living and the Dead", came out with the "Race Today" imprint in 1974. Johnson’s second volume, "Dread Beat and Blood", came out in 1975, and was released as a record in 1978. The volume was published by Bogle-L’Ouverture, a small press focused on Caribbean and Black British writers. In 1977, Johnson became the writer-in-residence for the London borough of Lambeth and was awarded the C. Day Lewis Fellowship. His third volume of poetry, "Inglan is a Bitch", was published in 1980 and became his commercial break-through. "Tings an’ Times: Selected Poems" was released by Bloodaxe in 1991, both as a book and as a record, and Johnson has remained active in performing his work all over the world, both as a poet and as a reggae artist.
In 2002, a selection of Johnson’s poetry called "Mi Revalueshanary Fren" (later renamed Selected Poems) was published in the Penguin Modern Classics series.
Johnson’s reggae albums include "Dread Beat an’ Blood" (1978), "Forces of Victory" (1979), "Bass Culture" (1980), "LKJ in Dub" (1980), "Making History" (1984), "Tings an’ Times" (1991), "More Time"(1999), and "Live in Paris" (2004).
Maurizio Lazzarato: Capital, Time, and Social Life in the Contemporary World
In this guest lecture, philosopher and sociologist Maurizio Lazzarato will discuss the major topics of his ongoing intellectual project: capital and debt, time and temporality, and the ways in which these forces structure the social world.
Introduced and organized by Bruce Barnhart, ILOS. Open for all interested.
The lecture will be held in French with parallel English translation by Francie Crebs. Q&A to follow!
Time and place: Apr. 26, 2018 3:00 PM – 5:30 PM, Aud 3 Eilert Sundts Hus
Maurizio Lazzarato is an Italian sociologist and philosopher, a researcher at Matisse/CNRS, Pantheon-Sorbonne University (University Paris I), and a member of the International College of Philosophy in Paris. Over the last decade, Lazzarato has published a series of books that, taken together, constitute one of the most insightful and provocative analyses of the ways in which capital shapes social life.
In "The Making of the Indebted Man" (2012), "Signs and Machines" (2014), and "Governing by Debt "(2015), Lazzarato shows the way in which late capitalism shapes subjectivity from both within and without, using debt as a tool to form and discipline individuals and social formations. Building on the work of Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari, Lazzarato creates a Marxist theoretical framework that cuts to the heart of contemporary economic and social life.
Lazzarato is one of the major figures of Italian post-workerist thought and of contemporary Marxist theory. His 1996 essay “Immaterial Labor” is a foundational text for thinking value and labor in the digital age. Lazzarato’s work crosses the boundaries between social theory, aesthetics, political science, and philosophy.
Literature and Rights Symposium
All talks are open to the public. No need to register in advance. Keynote speakers: Elizabeth S. Anker, Cornell University and Cheryl I. Harris, UCLA School of Law
Time and place: Nov. 10, 2016 – Nov. 11, 2016, Litteraturhuset and University of Oslo Library
Day 1
Location: Litteraturhuset (Nedjma). Thursday 10 November, 14:00-17:00
Moderator: Michael Lundblad
- Hanna Musiol - Aesthetic Justice
- Richard Nate - Human Rights and Their Enemies
- Bea Klüsener - "The Reign of Reason, Liberty and Peace"? Romantic Women Writers and The Notion of Human Rights
- Keynote (followed by discussion): Elizabeth S. Anker - Screening Immigrant Rights, or the Biopolitical Constitution of Europe
Day 2
Location: University of Oslo Library, Aud 1 Georg Sverdrups Hus Building, Blindern, Friday 11 November 9:30-12:00 and 14:00-18:00
- Marit Grøtta - Literature, Politics, and Forms-of-Life: Giorgio Agamben's Rethinking of the Political Subject
- Belinda Molteberg Steen - The Right to Belong: English 17th-Century “Conversion Narratives”
- Jan Grue - The Right to Representation: Character and Characterization in John Williams' Stoner
- Student presentation (organized by Kevin Steinman): Jonathon Harland - Humor and Rights
- Keynote (followed by discussion): Cheryl I. Harris (UCLA School of Law) - The Afterlife of Slavery: Race, Property and Debt
Moderator: Rebecca Scherr
- Dean Franco - The Matter of the Neighbor: Budd Schulberg, James Baldwin, and the Watts Writers Workshop
- Bruce Barnhart - Temporality, Racial Violence, and Property Rights: James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan and the Race Riot of 1919
- Student presentation: Mehdi Torkaman - Reading Beyond the Monster: Frankenstein, Intertextualized
- Alba Morollón Diaz-Faes - Who Is Afraid of Queer Fairy Tales? LGBTQ+ Representation in Contemporary Retellings
- Student presentation: Monica Bjermeland - Fairy Tales and Rights: What's Love Got to Do With It?
- Student presentation: Jakob Vorkinn - Gothic Horror and Future Human Rights
The event is funded by the Anders Jahre Foundation, Fritt Ord and ILOS - Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages, UiO
Organizer
Literature, Rights, and Imagined Communities
- Bruce Barnhart
- Tina Skouen
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
- Louisa Olufsen Layne (DPhil English Literature, University of Oxford, 2017)
- In the media:
- Interview about the Harlem Renaissance (at 40:00 --) NRK P2 Studio 2, July 30, 2020
- "Everyone digging their jazz was not enough": project interview
PhD Research Fellows (2016-19)
- Alba Morollón Díaz-Faes - Queer(ed) Fairy Tales.
- Belinda Molteberg Steen - The Poetics of Imagined Communities at War: Conversion Narratives in Early Modern England.