acase@tulane.edu / 1 / Joseph E Hiller

Critics mostly dismiss Victor Villasenor's 1991 Rain of Gold—the supposed biography of the author's father who enters the United States during the Prohibition era. Nevertheless, upon closer examination this narrative explores and erodes corroded human categories and racial reductions present in the Southwestern penal system. According to scholars in critical prison studies and critical race theory, the prison functions as a state-sanctioned method for prosecuting criminals and persecuting minority Americans. Juxtaposing Rain of Gold with these two areas of academic research, however, reveals that penitentiaries produce faulty and fallible notions of personhood that are, in part, responsible for the racialization and decimation that occur with incarceration. In resistance, Rain of Gold's protagonist challenges the carceral's ability to overdetermine identity by outmaneuvering criminal labels, redefining oppressive narratives and refusing to accept a dehumanized existence. As a thirteen-year-old in the Tombstone penitentiary, Juan Salvador Villasenor preserves his dream of a better future. While criminals, especially Mexican American criminals, have little room for redemption or rehabilitation under state law, Juan carefully contradicts social normalization by learning to read The Count of Monte Cristo, escaping several cells and trumped-up criminal charges, and practicing the techniques of a successful bootlegger. Juan, then, changes the material condition of his life, and the lives of his family members, as he turns prison's identity play inside out.

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What does it mean to be lawful in a secular age? Reincarnating Law in the Cosmos orbits around such a humanistic inquiry, offering a local contribution to a global jurisprudence by theorizing contemporary Indigenous and state laws in Canada in reciprocal relation to secular modernity. In this context, the study marks the first substantive engagement with Val Napoleon’s Ayook: Gitksan Legal Order, Law, and Legal Theory (2009). The study interprets Napoleon’s reification thesis on Gitxsan law and society as part of a historical disembedding process and evaluates it with reference to a 2016 pipeline agreement signed between a segment of Gitxsan hereditary leaders and the province of British Columbia. Translating Charles Taylor’s concept of excarnation for the legal sphere, it then expands upon Napoleon’s thesis by postulating the steady disembodying and disenchanting reduction of Gitxsan lawful life. To address this dilemma, the study supplements the active and reasoned sense of Gitxsan citizenship posited in Ayook by recasting it in phenomenological terms as a distinctly embodied form of legal agency. To clarify this aspect of agency, the study applies critical race feminist Preeti Dhaliwal’s legal research and playwriting method known as jurisprudential theatre. Dhaliwal’s method shapes the study in two significant ways. First, her impetus for developing the method draws from her own witnessing and overcoming of excarnation in the Canadian law school and immigration system, demonstrating it to be a larger problem traversing multi-juridical borders. To address this problem, the method, in turn, enables the innovation of a new Gitxsan concept of legal agency – the ‘wii bil’ust (giant star) – and an original drama that reveals the real-world struggle and heroism of reincarnating the Gitxsan legal order across generations over the past century. To encourage the broader reincarnation of law, and building on Jeremy Webber’s critique of the functionalist account of customary law, the study points towards a shared grammar of incarnational law. That is, a grammar deepened by embodied modes of relationality, reimagined cosmologies attuned to our earthly predicaments, and creative fluency in multiple languages and traditions, among other habitable zones. / Graduate / 2023-07-15

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