Professor Rose Casey (3:26)

Okay, yeah. Thank you. So I am obsessed with literature's transformative potential, with the power of literature or of art to move us, not necessarily in an empathetic way. Can be quite skeptical of those claims that literature can promote empathy, but instead with the potential of literature and of art to actually reshape our thought slowly, to slowly reshape our thoughts. And so my research, my teaching, my intellectual life in general, I think a lot about generative critique and about literature's generative capacities, about the power of imagination, of thinking expansively and kind of not just critically, but with curiosity. And I suppose this is also my disposition towards the world as well. To think about transformation in a really positive sense, to think about justice, always to be thinking about justice. And my work is also constitutively interdisciplinary. It has been for as long as I can remember. My interests, my literary interests, for as long as I can remember, have always been about being drawn to texts that are really powerful, that are often somewhat experimental, that are certainly not avoiding the fact that they are literature or an aesthetic object, but at the same time, works that are also obsessed with big questions about the world that we live in. And then the other thing that I see as shaping so much of my work, both in the educational setting and just really, again, a kind of dispositional thing, is with the enduring significance of the postcolonial as a framework for understanding globalized injustice. In the 21st century, there was this period in which the postcolonial was not cool anymore. It was understood by some scholars, and certainly by institutions as being somewhat passe or perhaps a bit too troublesome in some ways. And I'm really enthused and relieved by the fact that there seems to be an increasing recognition that we can't not understand our contemporary moment as anything but postcolonial. And postcolonial in the sense of colonialism's endurance, impact, and also ongoing status, existence.

Dr. Arnab Duta Roy (6:24)

Thank you so much. That was very insightful. And I think that'll take us right into the subject of your book. Could you briefly introduce our listeners to aesthetic impropriety, property law, and postcolonial style? Say, if you were to identify one or two major interventions of this book, what would they be?

Professor Rose Casey (6:52)

Okay, thank you. Good question. So, you know, this book announces itself as being about aesthetics, as about property law, as about postcolonial style or literature. Probably in terms of its big interventions, though, I would say that it's really about anti colonial liberation. And also about how literary works are involved in changing the law as participants in thinking and moving towards more just societies. Okay, so thinking about anti colonial liberation, about racial justice, about gender equity, but also about how literature is involved in actually producing legal change. There's a little bit of background which I think is helpful in terms of giving some kind of the equivalent of plot summary, but for a book. So, you know, as the title suggests, this is a book that's primarily interested in property law. And this is because property law was so significant to British colonial rule. It was a major tool of the British colonial of the British Empire. And it established a proprietary relationship between land and people that continues to exist today. And because of the extent of the British Empire. Right, like that it shapes so much of the world that we continue to live in. And because the law changes very slowly, it continues to shape postcolonial societies long after independence. So this proprietary relationship we can think about in terms of land theft of resource extraction and racialized dispossession. It's an expansive understanding of what property means. And again, it's really important to think with Ann Laura Stoller, that these are histories that remain in the present. This is not over by any means. My account of property, though, is expensive. It's not just about real estate. For instance, we have learned from legal theorists of colonial racial capitalism, like Bruno Bunda, Aileen Morton Robinson, Stephen Best, that property is always racialized. We can't not understand property and its legal underpinnings as anything other than being constitutively involved with race in terms of ownership, but also in terms of construction of race. But I think one of the things that I find most exciting about the research that I was doing in the course of writing this book is that there are a broad set of reforms happening across the world at the moment that are undoing law's colonial legacies. So we might think, yes, about land law, but also environmental law. And I look at that particularly in relation to Nigeria and the Niger Delta. Personal goods, yes, but also about inheritance and divorce law, which I look at in India, 20th century India, intellectual property. And I'm particularly looking at South Africa as a jurisdiction in this context. But it's a much bigger global process in terms of how intellectual property as it exists at the moment, tends to facilitate the dispossession of indigenous peoples in particular, but also in formerly colonial communities across the world. And then as well, thinking in terms of property in relation to admiralty law in England, because it was admiralty law and laws that were passed in admiralty law that justified and made chattel slavery legal. And that has to do with the doctrine of legal personality. Okay, so broadly I'm looking at all of these different jurisdictions, I'm looking at different writers and different forms of property law across the world. And I'm looking at changes and legal reforms that are, I would say, building towards or participating in a broader project of ongoing anti colonial liberation. And so one of the things that I found is that we have to recognize the activists and legal actors who are involved in these changes. So in relation to intellectual property law that's being led by indigenous peoples globally, even though I look particularly at post apartheid South Africa, in the Indian context, I'm looking at feminist activists and also feminists, legal actors and progressive jurists. And the case of the Niger Delta, I'm looking at Nigerian activists, but also then European environmental groups and law firms in Europe. And so there are these big legal changes that are happening, but there are. Also. One of the things I discovered in writing this book is that writers are also involved in producing legal change. And in fact, in some ways that's where I started. And it was a hunch that then led me to finding out that that hunch was correct. It was a hunch that began when I was working on Arundhati Roy's 1997 novel the God of Small Things, and recognizing that it was all about property law and about Roy's mother's very famous in India case in which she contested the inheritance law that disinherited her from the family home. And over the course of writing this book of many years, of course, what I discovered was that, yeah, these literary works that seem to be interested in anti colonial efforts in justice quite broadly, were also participating in the ideas that they had about property, were also participating in legal change in the sense that they often preempted it. So the big ideas that they had about injustice as it related to female dispossession under Indian inheritance and divorce laws, for instance, actually in some ways came after, but also in some ways came before measures that then were enacted in law. And I think that's really exciting to recognize that novels and poetry and short stories are really materially changing the world that we live in. And not purely by activist contestatory means, but because the ideas that they're exploring and the way they're exploring those ideas aesthetically is all part of this broader discursive process in which ideas circulate. And slowly, over the course of time, that circulation of ideas propels us towards ultimately better societies, even if sometimes there are some quite significant blips in that process.

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Professor Rose Casey (15:36)

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Dr. Arnab Duta Roy (16:36)

This is wonderful. I think you've laid out the framework and we can now go and dissect different aspects of what you brought up. But before we move into anything else, I would like to stay a little bit with this idea of aesthetic impropriety. It seems to be a binding framework that is holding together and shaping how we understand and confront a variety of discourses about aesthetics, law, activism, and history. Can you speak a little more about your conceptualization of aesthetic impropriety in this book?

Professor Rose Casey (17:26)

Yeah, for sure. Okay, so as a category, it illuminates ongoing resistance to British colonialism, and it, yeah, as you say, is bringing together ideas about aesthetics and justice and property law, all encapsulated in this one concept. I think it's important to really spell out that it's a concept that is at once critique and affirmation. So kind of in the way that Christine Sharp uses or develops the concept of weak work, aesthetic impropriety is at once confronting English law's role in dispossession and in dispossession very broadly, as I've said, and at the same time a concept that allows us to recognize logics, modalities, and structures of thought that are working towards continued anti colonial liberation, racial justice, gender equity. And so the way that works is if we think about the improper, this IM part is important. The concept of impropriety is categorically non proprietary. It is instead contradistinctively open. It's inclusionary, but in a really expansive way. So it's refusing the logics of proprietary ownership that English law cemented around the world throughout the many centuries of British colonial domination. So it's absolutely linked to property laws specifically, but also ideas about ownership and property more broadly that underpin those laws. And it's rejecting, if we think about English property law, which, you know, Anglo American property law, most listeners will probably be quite familiar with in some ways, if we think about that as based on a premise of enclosure, of enclosing a particular space for someone to own and exclude others from, impropriety is rejecting that premise. But it's not just critique, it's also emancipatory. This idea of the impropriety is a way of marking a kind of propulsive or hopeful movement that I see in the aesthetics of a lot of the works that I'm looking at, and then in terms of the logics actually also in the legal reforms that I examine as well. So. So to think about that aesthetic piece first, really, this project began when I was trying to find ways to identify or pin down or describe or understand a particular kind of style that I was seeing across many postcolonial works, particularly novels, but not just limited to novels that were not in the kind of realist canon, but were instead experimenting with language, with narrative and narrative order, with the construction of ideas on the page, with ways of linking concepts together that were perhaps, or linking novels or poetry together through concepts rather than through a kind of chronological progression through. So I was thinking about, for instance, at the very beginning, Arundhati Roy's the God of Small Things. I was also thinking at that point about works like Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. But what I was seeing then across these works and then across the others that I'm looking at. So the book talks at length about Ben Oakree's work and in his short story what the Tapsts saw in relation to Chugozhi Obioma's much more recent novel the Fisherman. I look at Roy, I look at Zoe Wickham's novel David's Story, that was published in 2000. I look at M. Nobese Phillips Song that was published in 2007, 2008, possibly. And so I'M seeing. What I was trying to do was name or identify or dis. Or, you know, speak to these aesthetic commonalities across texts that were appearing across different cultural and geographic contexts, but yet had key similarities aesthetically that seem to be doing more than. Seem to be linked through more than just a particular temporal moment. And curiously, so obsessed with property, if we think about property broadly, all of them obsessed with pushing against colonialism and its after effects and its enduring existence, but not just pushing against also building. Building something new that is affirmative and productive and based in equality and meaningful life for everyone. And so then once I'd been trying to find these ways of linking together these aesthetic commonalities and starting to then look also kind of at a parallel sense at some of these legal regimes that existed at the same time, what was really cool was that I was discovering that many of these legal reforms that are happening, and I use reform not just in a kind of ameliory way, but sometimes in quite. Sometimes much more kind of radical overhaul. What I was finding was that these legal reforms could also be understood in relation to impropriety. And if aesthetic is naming a particular style in literary works, we can also think though, of it naming then a kind of structure of thought that corresponds to that style. And whilst we might not think about legal instruments as aesthetic, we can recognize that they have underpinning logics and structures of thought that correspond to aesthetics, to style as it operates in literature.

Dr. Arnab Duta Roy (25:05)

That is so wonderful and so interesting. And I feel that it makes a lot of sense to me as well. I mean, living in Florida, I see this predominant way of thinking about land and nature as in terms of this binary of either developed or underdeveloped. Like if it has not been turned into a strip mall, it will eventually be turned into a strip mall. And I feel like hearing you talk about aesthetic impropriety, I mean, I can relate to that and how writers and artists in Florida are kind of responding to this very extractive way of thinking.

Professor Rose Casey (25:57)

About everything, right, Based on extraction and accumulation, and instead trying to build something that's much more sustainable, more holistic.

Dr. Arnab Duta Roy (26:10)

So I do want to ask you about this connection, right. Like you said that English property law has played a major role in causing and facilitating colonial and post colonial dispossession. Right. However, you are not just defining dispossession in relation to property ownership or land dispute, right? Because here dispossession is referring to something much broader, a form of loss, injustice, violence against the colonized, against their cultures, histories, art, and against Subjugated ecosystems. So can you talk about this legacy of English property law a little bit, this connection?

Professor Rose Casey (27:01)

Yeah, yeah. Okay. And so again, just to really emphasize that this more expansive version of understanding what property is more expansive than we see in the law as such, that is really developed from people who are working in black studies, critical race theory and indigenous studies. So I mentioned Banda and Morton Robinson best. There are many others as well that we might add to that. Sylvia Wynter for one. And so there's a long history to this broader understanding of what property might mean and property law might mean. Cheryl Harris, Whiteness as property is a major thinker in this area. So perhaps what's helpful is if I give some examples of the particular types of dispossession that I look at and particular instances in various different locations. So one, for instance is in, I look at environmental harms in the Niger Delta, well known site of massive environmental and human harms as a result of extensive and almost uninhibited petroleum extraction. The petroleum industry there operating in a way that it long has done, which is to understand places that are particularly in the global south, or if they're in the global north, where the communities are predominantly racially minoritized or indigenous. And so the kind of extent of the dispossession there began with the. I mean, actually it preceded this, but it most particularly began noticeably, began with the Mineral oils Ordinance of 1914 in Nigeria when it was a British colony. And at that point that ordinance turned over an existing relationship to land that was much more symbiotic, did not assume that land could be parceled off and owned, but that instead it was something to be kind of shared in perpetuity rather than extracted from in one particular moment in time. And so looking there, in some ways, sure, I'm looking at land law, which is a more classic conceptualization of property. At the same time, I think it's important to recognize that when we think about petroleum and oil and these forms of fuel which are, you know, rapidly accelerating us towards climate endpoints, we're already in climate catastrophe, that they are to do with forms of property ownership that we see developed really in English law and English law as it was differentially imposed around the world throughout this project of colonial domination. And so then thinking about dispossession, we're thinking about environmental harms as well, and ecological harms, harms to fish and aquatic life and trees and all forms of organisms that make up a particular area, which, when utterly devastated, would take just so many years. To kind of replenish but also human harms, which are to do with things like massively increased rates of cancer or skin disease, or displacement, people being forced out of a region because of a new kind of industry that makes it impossible to sustain their livelihoods. And that dispossession is also racialized because the majority of the people in the Niger Delta who have been harmed are ethnic minorities within Nigeria. And so there are all of these complexities to dispossession that go far beyond having one's land taken away from them. So the project of the book is to sketch out this extensive form of dispossession. I'd be happy to talk about more examples, but that's one that kind of sums it up, I think, in ways that are potentially helpful. On top of building this fake volcano for months, I give my daughter Smarty Pants Vitamins to support her brain health. So her science fair project sounds more like and less like. And while I may say it's not a competition, of course it's a f ing competition. Choose Smarty Pants Vitamins to support your kid's brain health and save the science fair. Shop on Amazon smartypantsvitamins.com or at target today.

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Professor Rose Casey (33:26)

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Dr. Arnab Duta Roy (34:26)

Thank you so much. That's very interesting. Also very depressing.

Professor Rose Casey (34:31)

It is depressing. And so that is. I talk about the Niger Delta in my first chapter, and I work throughout the book towards a sense of hope and of achievements towards justice and equity being made. My final chapter is in fact about My conclusion is about hope.

Dr. Arnab Duta Roy (34:58)

And that is my next question, because I found this quote from your introduction really interesting. You say that aesthetics can be a site of radical possibility and that postcolonial legal systems can play a significant role in producing more just societies. Could you talk about this, this idea a little more?

Professor Rose Casey (35:27)

Yeah, for sure. Okay. I will say in terms of. Yeah, I mean, I'm really committed to this idea that, yes, aesthetics can be a site of radical possibility, that postcolonial legal systems are not just that legal systems in general are not just harmful, despite the fact that law, as it was imposed by Britain and other colonial powers, is so associated with this possession, and rightly so. It was a tool and has been a tool of oppression and domination, and it often continues to be right even in our contemporary society right now, Very much so. And that's something that postcolonialists are very well aware of. At the same time, at the same time, I think it's important that we recognize that the law can also be a tool for justice. There are many ways of fighting for justice, and I don't think it's only through the law that it can happen. But the law is one site of justice. And it's important to recognize that in terms of this idea of aesthetics being a sight of radical possibility. So much of my thinking about this is inspired, I mean, a long kind of history thinking about, say, Raymond Williams, for instance, but also Candy's choose the Difference Aesthetics Makes. Just absolutely fabulous book, came out in 2019 and is just so it's a book that I turn to when I am feeling just really disheartened about the state of the humanities and the neoliberal university, because she's so committed to this idea that aesthetics can be a site of Radical possibility. And that's despite it also being aesthetic theory being a site of exclusion also. So David Lloyd talks about this in relation to the Enlightenment and wonderful readings of Kant and thinking about particularly racial exclusion as it's built into aesthetic theory. And yet, at the same time, the examples that I'm showing throughout this book and the examples that other really exciting thinkers are coming up with demonstrate that the aesthetic should not be just simply disregarded as detached or ethically compromised. Instead, we can think about how, for instance, experimental, in the case of my book, experimental or experiment expressly literary works, and also some visual art as well, that is unashamedly aesthetic. They reward sustained engagement. And it is this sustained engagement that I think makes the works themselves powerful, and our reading of them powerful, whether that's in the classroom or at home, whether that's critics writing about them. And one of the things that I think is difficult about grasping the kind of radical possibilities of the aesthetic itself is because the impact on collective sensibilities can be really hard to measure. And yet I really want us to think hard about the potential for there being power in that. I really want us to think hard about the fact that just because something isn't easily measurable doesn't mean that it necessarily doesn't bear impact. Right? The book thinks and talks a lot about aesthetic force and impact and how it accrues over time because of this impact on our structures of thought, on these collective sensibilities, and how these kind of new ideas, new ways of thinking, of engaging with the world, actually, over time, changes what we think and how we engage. So, for instance, just quick example, in the introduction, I talk about the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol in 2020, which is part of the kind of upsurge in the Black Lives Matter movement at that time. But it didn't come out of nowhere. And it wasn't just a response to the Black Lives Matter movement. Particularly since about 2007, there had been increased engagement in Bristol and also in the UK more generally, about problems with figures like Edward Colston, and particularly problems. He was a wealthy merchant in Bristol. He made his money by being involved in the slave trade, by funding it, became extremely wealthy. And Bristol had long seen him as this philanthropic figure who helped bring wealth to the city. But Hugh Locke, who is this brilliant British Guyanese visual artist, experiments with so many different mediums and in such a really wonderfully complex and playful manner. He has done a lot of work with reconfiguring statues and what they mean and he did this in Bristol with Edward Colston's statue in particular and a couple of others also, long before that statue was toppled. And his work is not. It's very clearly anti colonial and yet at the same time, it's also not populist art either. It is experimental. It's aesthetically flamboyant and complex. You have to sit and think about it. And in that sitting and thinking, over the course of approximately 15 years he's been doing this work, before 2007, two people's ideas started to change. And it's that long duration that I think is important. In this case, a relatively short period of time. But thinking about aesthetics as this site of radical possibility is a way of recognizing that sometimes big change takes time, but art can be involved in that. Thinking of art expansively to include literature also.

Dr. Arnab Duta Roy (42:44)

That is fascinating. Thank you so much. I do have a question about the scope of your book. You mentioned that you primarily focus on contexts from India, Nigeria, South Africa, even the Black Atlantic. What drew you to focus on these such distinct geopolitical spaces and how have they distinctly engaged the idea of aesthetic impropriety?

Professor Rose Casey (43:17)

Great. Yes, thank you. So as I mentioned earlier, I was really drawn in this project initially by the literary works and trying to find connections between them. And as I was trying to. As I was thinking about those connections, I realized one of. I mean, very obvious thing is that these are all sites of a former British colonial domination, but also therefore shaped in fundamental and long lasting ways by English law. And you know, you asked a minute ago about postcolonial legal systems producing justice. One of the. Yes, and I show many examples of how laws change and that that's good. For instance, I talk about. Just to kind of back up one second, I talk about South Africa and the Indigenous Knowledge act that was signed in 2019 to protect collective oral and ephemeral knowledge produced by indigenous peoples in South Africa and therefore to protect it from exploitation both within the country, but also abroad and by the global north. But that was 2019. And one of the problems with the law is that it changes very slowly. And so these English legal systems that existed in all of these disparate places are being chipped away at, but they also chip. The legal system is very entrenched. And Nigeria's legal system, for instance, is in many ways very similar to British law still, as there's a recent court case that's going through at the moment, Oppobi vs Shell, about environmental devastation, and one of the chief justices basically says, yeah, to all intents and purposes, Nigerian law is very similar to British law. And so I was recognizing right, that these are, they're very distinct culturally, geographically, politically, historically, these places are all very distinct. But they are joined by English law and its enduring impact. So there is this commonality between them all that goes beyond language. But one of the things that also I found important is one of the things that I think is important just in general is to do comparative interdisciplinary work, because we must attend to those specificities. And I do that in my book consistently. But making connections and doing comparative work helps us to see bigger pictures and also helps us to move towards more just societies. So in bringing together domains that are not self evidently connected, my book identifies potential nodes of solidarity. And I think that's really important. It makes existing literary, legal, aesthetic and activist rather coalitions visible. It facilitates future interjurisdictional work. And interjurisdictional work is happening already in Europe, both in the UK and in the Netherlands. And I think there is increasing opportunity for that work too. And the interjurisdictional work is important when we are looking at global systems like colonialism, like the post colonial, as it were, world that we live in right now, and making these connections and identifying these coalitions is a way of building towards anti colonial, racially just futures. So I think that the comparison is vital and very possible. So as long as the specificities are attended to, that comparison is so important for thinking about justice and for thinking about the world we live in and its kind of global distributions in ways that might not just accede to the current order of domination that exists.

Dr. Arnab Duta Roy (48:12)

That makes a lot of sense to me. I mean, we are united by a colonial legacy and the legal system seems to be a big part of that legacy. So yeah, but to know that there is a way for resistance to really make some kind of a tangible change, that's a comforting idea. So thank you so much for that.

Professor Rose Casey (48:40)

You're welcome. And the resistance is happening and it's already happening in localized spaces. And I think one perfect example of this is the way that indigenous communities have, I mean, at least since the 1960s, but with increasing pace from the 1980s, and have made such a significant impact on how intellectual property is conceptualized. To the extent that the World Intellectual Property Organization, which is part of the Global north establishment, has had to recognize that intellectual property law, as it had existed for 100 plus years, was allowing for continued resource extraction of knowledge, of culture, pharmaceuticals, the elements that make pharmaceuticals right, and that intellectual property laws needed to change. So the coalitions are already happening. And one of the things that I think postcolonial studies can do and that my book seeks to participate in, is identify many of these existing coalitions, these existing activist efforts, which are massive, and bring them together in the effort to continue to build more coalitions and keep working towards justice and learn from these, these incredible activists and thinkers around the world.

Dr. Arnab Duta Roy (50:25)

That is beautiful. Thank you. So we now have come to the end of the interview and I would just, we can conclude by this one last question. So if there is one idea or thought or a lesson that you would like readers to remember or learn or to take away from the experience of reading this book, book, what would it be?

Professor Rose Casey (50:50)

So that's hard because for me, what's most exciting and the biggest gift really is what readers see for themselves. And I actually can't wait to hear what people's takeaways are that I hope will not necessarily be things that I am explicitly identifying, but will help me continue to think through these connections and in terms of that continuing to think, things that I'm eager for more of, to do more of in my own scholarship, to hear more of from other people. One is to keep thinking about and theorising aesthetics as this emancipatory force. Another is continued comparative interdisciplinary work because it's so exciting and so important. And then another is the conditions that allow for this work. So, you know, I can't think about either of those elements without also thinking about the time it takes to do a project that is as big in scope as this, that also attends to particularities unnecessarily. So. And so if one thing that people thought about was okay, this is the kind of book that requires universities to exist and to be funded and tenure track jobs to exist, that will be a good takeaway.

Dr. Arnab Duta Roy (52:24)

Thank you so much. Thank you. Reading this book, I learned a lot. I think the ideas, the concepts, and the way you are historicizing such broad expanses of colonial and post colonial history is itself so great. Plus, your book is very accessible, readable, and the writing is marvelous. So I'm sure those who have read your book have learned a lot just like me. And I'm sure this podcast episode would also motivate many to go check your book out. So again, it's been a pleasure having your host. Thank you so much for finding time.

Professor Rose Casey (53:12)

Thank you, Arnav. I love talking with you. It's. It's always so great to share ideas and I really appreciate the chance to share those ideas here.

Dr. Arnab Duta Roy (53:22)

Thank you.

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