Colin Dayan
Biographic Data
| ID | 1394596 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Colin Dayan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Colin |
| FAMILY NAME | Dayan |
| SIGNATURE | DAYAN C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Vanderbilt University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6557-3462 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 8 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 21 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Speaking Again With Nasser Hussain
Nasser Hussain’s “Auden’s Law Like Love”
Guilty Things
What kind of legal history might account for the unique and continued practice of forfeiture in the United States? Law enforcement, as many recent writers have argued, has grown increasingly dependent on this fail-safe way to gain revenue, since civil asset forfeiture has few procedural safeguards. Unlike criminal forfeiture (in personam), civil forfeiture generally proceeds against the offending property (in rem), not against the person. A piece…
Auden’s Law Like Love
That Old Feeling, or Thinking Dandridge in the Time of Trump
In the dark drama and shock tactics of the Trump White House, I found myself obsessed with Dorothy Dandridge, a woman I had been quite unaware of until now. In following her traces, I recall the South in the sixties, race discrimination and raw hate, as well as recognize her particular kind of beauty, so strong that it had to be forgotten. Her doomed life led me to reflect on how old inequalities are always repackaged in new ways. What does it me…
Possum Hunting
This meditation marks a return to the South and its somewhat raucous racism, a hate so visceral that it can be known only through the tracks of the nonhuman: the possum that suffer in the destruction we have wrought against all species, vegetable and mammalian, everywhere
The Dog in the Poem
Through the route of the dog, I examine the limits and reach of what I call Williams's “poetic ethnography.” In disavowing any cherished humanism, William Carlos Williams writes his long poem Paterson. In acknowledging the obscenity of his twentieth-century world and a brutal history that he knew to be particular to America, he sought a practical and embodied method of writing that did not entail dominance and instead skirted intelligibility
In Haiti, August 2011
In this memoir of my return to Haiti in August 2011, I reflect on what remains, the travesties of humanitarian aid, and the on-going strength and resilience of the people who have been displaced, violated, or depersonalized by disasters both natural and man-made
Nelson Mandela on Nightline ; or, How Palestine Matters
Review Article| May 01 2014 Nelson Mandela on Nightline; or, How Palestine Matters Colin Dayan Colin Dayan Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google boundary 2 (2014) 41 (2): 14–17. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-2685989 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Colin Dayan; Nelson Mandela on Nightline; or, How Palestine Matters. boundary 2 1 May 2014; 41 (2): 14–17. doi: …
With Law at the Edge of Life
This article seeks to make sense of the diverse and contradictory materials of law that intervene in everyday life through strategies of containment, exclusion, and extermination. The prison is now the central public institution in the United States. Though hidden from sight, it defines our society in profound ways. Concentrating on the recent hunger strikes in the security housing units (SHUs) of Pelican Bay and throughout the California prison …
Writing in a Belittered World
The essays by Avery F. Gordon, Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley and Matt Richardson, and Chris Bongie about Colin Dayan's work and thought, in their differing forms and intent, inspire Dayan to do something like a riff on each, and she attempts to capture the gist of each reaction and elaborate her response as a kind of homage to these readers. In thinking of each section of her response essay as part of a triptych (or trinity, perhaps), mutually overla…
And then came culture
Both a tribute and ritual of remembrance, "And then came culture" elaborates the intensely political critique that Trouillot commanded throughout his life. Whether writing about Haiti, the silences of history, neocolonialism, or the relations between state and nation, he fought hard against the academic generalities and benign consensus that hid the realities of racism and erasure. One of the words that most haunted him-its uses and abuses-was th…
Remembering Trouillot
A Legal Ethnography
This chapter examines how judges determined the character of slaves. In the South, the adaptation of Lockean notions of personal identity to slaves was inextricably bound up with the understanding of person as a forensic term and the kind of legal incapacity and nonrecognition that signaled negative personhood. Thomas Morris in Southern Slavery and the Law : 1619–1860 argues that the most crucial legal fiction was that “the slave was an object of…
Taxonomies
This chapter describes how Herman Melville recognized the existence of what he had once called not “ordinarily human”: the chattels that gave new meaning to persons , the human anomaly constituted by law as property . Melville is obsessed with the making and unmaking of human materials as well as humans and animals. The chapter then assesses what it means in times of torture and dissembling to be like an animal . It all began with chattels. Their…
Holy Dogs, Hecuba’s Bark
This introductory chapter explains that when ghosts come before the law, they are sometimes treated as if real insofar as they have legal effect. Indeed, for legal purposes—in cases of undue influence, defamation, or fraud—spectral emanations may become proof, just like any facts. On this bewitched ground, the fantastic and the commonplace intermingle. In the case of wills, especially, even when the law does not acknowledge the unique gifts of sp…
The Law Is a White Dog
Abused dogs, prisoners tortured in Guantánamo and supermax facilities, or slaves killed by the state—all are deprived of personhood through legal acts. Such deprivations have recurred throughout history, and the law sustains these terrors and banishments even as it upholds the civil order. Examining such troubling cases, this book tackles key societal questions: How does the law construct our identities? How do its rules and sanctions make or unm…
Who Owns the Body, and When Does it Die
Rituals of Belief, Practices of Law
This essay brings law more fully into the rituals of terror, the fictions of slavery that Brown portrays so powerfully in *The Reaper's Garden.* In tracking the ghost-ridden traces of persons and property, I consider how palpable and visible remain the deposits of slave history, how natural become the uses of the supernatural. What are the limits of legal thought, and how deeply did it impress and transform the understanding of the sacred, not on…
Due Process and Lethal Confinement
No concept has been as central to constitutional law as due process. In the current war on terror and the Bush administration's treatment of suspected terrorists, no protection is more threatened. The cases that pertain to due process-when it is due and how much-are crucial to the lives of those restrained in their liberty. Among those labeled the "worst of the worst," especially offshore at Guantánamo Bay, the innocent fare far worse than those …
Legal Terrors
This essay examines the conditions under which categories of identity are legally reconstructed. It argues that legal practice and spiritual belief in colonial North America and certain parts of the Caribbean shed light on current rituals of dispossession and torture in the United States
And then came culture
Both a tribute and ritual of remembrance, "And then came culture" elaborates the intensely political critique that Trouillot commanded throughout his life. Whether writing about Haiti, the silences of history, neocolonialism, or the relations between state and nation, he fought hard against the academic generalities and benign consensus that hid the realities of racism and erasure. One of the words that most haunted him-its uses and abuses-was th…
Legal Terrors
This essay examines the conditions under which categories of identity are legally reconstructed. It argues that legal practice and spiritual belief in colonial North America and certain parts of the Caribbean shed light on current rituals of dispossession and torture in the United States
In Haiti, August 2011
In this memoir of my return to Haiti in August 2011, I reflect on what remains, the travesties of humanitarian aid, and the on-going strength and resilience of the people who have been displaced, violated, or depersonalized by disasters both natural and man-made
With Law at the Edge of Life
This article seeks to make sense of the diverse and contradictory materials of law that intervene in everyday life through strategies of containment, exclusion, and extermination. The prison is now the central public institution in the United States. Though hidden from sight, it defines our society in profound ways. Concentrating on the recent hunger strikes in the security housing units (SHUs) of Pelican Bay and throughout the California prison …
Remembering Trouillot
Due Process and Lethal Confinement
No concept has been as central to constitutional law as due process. In the current war on terror and the Bush administration's treatment of suspected terrorists, no protection is more threatened. The cases that pertain to due process-when it is due and how much-are crucial to the lives of those restrained in their liberty. Among those labeled the "worst of the worst," especially offshore at Guantánamo Bay, the innocent fare far worse than those …
Legal Terrors
This essay examines the conditions under which categories of identity are legally reconstructed. It argues that legal practice and spiritual belief in colonial North America and certain parts of the Caribbean shed light on current rituals of dispossession and torture in the United States
Due Process and Lethal Confinement
No concept has been as central to constitutional law as due process. In the current war on terror and the Bush administration's treatment of suspected terrorists, no protection is more threatened. The cases that pertain to due process-when it is due and how much-are crucial to the lives of those restrained in their liberty. Among those labeled the "worst of the worst," especially offshore at Guantánamo Bay, the innocent fare far worse than those …
Rituals of Belief, Practices of Law
This essay brings law more fully into the rituals of terror, the fictions of slavery that Brown portrays so powerfully in *The Reaper's Garden.* In tracking the ghost-ridden traces of persons and property, I consider how palpable and visible remain the deposits of slave history, how natural become the uses of the supernatural. What are the limits of legal thought, and how deeply did it impress and transform the understanding of the sacred, not on…
A Legal Ethnography
This chapter examines how judges determined the character of slaves. In the South, the adaptation of Lockean notions of personal identity to slaves was inextricably bound up with the understanding of person as a forensic term and the kind of legal incapacity and nonrecognition that signaled negative personhood. Thomas Morris in Southern Slavery and the Law : 1619–1860 argues that the most crucial legal fiction was that “the slave was an object of…
Taxonomies
This chapter describes how Herman Melville recognized the existence of what he had once called not “ordinarily human”: the chattels that gave new meaning to persons , the human anomaly constituted by law as property . Melville is obsessed with the making and unmaking of human materials as well as humans and animals. The chapter then assesses what it means in times of torture and dissembling to be like an animal . It all began with chattels. Their…
Holy Dogs, Hecuba’s Bark
This introductory chapter explains that when ghosts come before the law, they are sometimes treated as if real insofar as they have legal effect. Indeed, for legal purposes—in cases of undue influence, defamation, or fraud—spectral emanations may become proof, just like any facts. On this bewitched ground, the fantastic and the commonplace intermingle. In the case of wills, especially, even when the law does not acknowledge the unique gifts of sp…
The Law Is a White Dog
Abused dogs, prisoners tortured in Guantánamo and supermax facilities, or slaves killed by the state—all are deprived of personhood through legal acts. Such deprivations have recurred throughout history, and the law sustains these terrors and banishments even as it upholds the civil order. Examining such troubling cases, this book tackles key societal questions: How does the law construct our identities? How do its rules and sanctions make or unm…
Who Owns the Body, and When Does it Die
Remembering Trouillot
Nelson Mandela on Nightline ; or, How Palestine Matters
Review Article| May 01 2014 Nelson Mandela on Nightline; or, How Palestine Matters Colin Dayan Colin Dayan Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google boundary 2 (2014) 41 (2): 14–17. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-2685989 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Colin Dayan; Nelson Mandela on Nightline; or, How Palestine Matters. boundary 2 1 May 2014; 41 (2): 14–17. doi: …
With Law at the Edge of Life
This article seeks to make sense of the diverse and contradictory materials of law that intervene in everyday life through strategies of containment, exclusion, and extermination. The prison is now the central public institution in the United States. Though hidden from sight, it defines our society in profound ways. Concentrating on the recent hunger strikes in the security housing units (SHUs) of Pelican Bay and throughout the California prison …
Writing in a Belittered World
The essays by Avery F. Gordon, Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley and Matt Richardson, and Chris Bongie about Colin Dayan's work and thought, in their differing forms and intent, inspire Dayan to do something like a riff on each, and she attempts to capture the gist of each reaction and elaborate her response as a kind of homage to these readers. In thinking of each section of her response essay as part of a triptych (or trinity, perhaps), mutually overla…
And then came culture
Both a tribute and ritual of remembrance, "And then came culture" elaborates the intensely political critique that Trouillot commanded throughout his life. Whether writing about Haiti, the silences of history, neocolonialism, or the relations between state and nation, he fought hard against the academic generalities and benign consensus that hid the realities of racism and erasure. One of the words that most haunted him-its uses and abuses-was th…
In Haiti, August 2011
In this memoir of my return to Haiti in August 2011, I reflect on what remains, the travesties of humanitarian aid, and the on-going strength and resilience of the people who have been displaced, violated, or depersonalized by disasters both natural and man-made
Possum Hunting
This meditation marks a return to the South and its somewhat raucous racism, a hate so visceral that it can be known only through the tracks of the nonhuman: the possum that suffer in the destruction we have wrought against all species, vegetable and mammalian, everywhere
The Dog in the Poem
Through the route of the dog, I examine the limits and reach of what I call Williams's “poetic ethnography.” In disavowing any cherished humanism, William Carlos Williams writes his long poem Paterson. In acknowledging the obscenity of his twentieth-century world and a brutal history that he knew to be particular to America, he sought a practical and embodied method of writing that did not entail dominance and instead skirted intelligibility
That Old Feeling, or Thinking Dandridge in the Time of Trump
In the dark drama and shock tactics of the Trump White House, I found myself obsessed with Dorothy Dandridge, a woman I had been quite unaware of until now. In following her traces, I recall the South in the sixties, race discrimination and raw hate, as well as recognize her particular kind of beauty, so strong that it had to be forgotten. Her doomed life led me to reflect on how old inequalities are always repackaged in new ways. What does it me…
Auden’s Law Like Love
Guilty Things
What kind of legal history might account for the unique and continued practice of forfeiture in the United States? Law enforcement, as many recent writers have argued, has grown increasingly dependent on this fail-safe way to gain revenue, since civil asset forfeiture has few procedural safeguards. Unlike criminal forfeiture (in personam), civil forfeiture generally proceeds against the offending property (in rem), not against the person. A piece…
Speaking Again With Nasser Hussain
Nasser Hussain’s “Auden’s Law Like Love”
Sociology (13 works) · Law (11 works) · Political science (11 works) · History (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Art (7 works) · Colonialism, slavery, and trade (6 works) · History (6 works) · Aesthetics (5 works) · Epistemology (5 works)