The Claims of History: Native and National Narratives of Land as Property in the U.S.

• Applicants: Professorin Dr. Sabine Nicole Meyer; Professor Dr. Peter Schneck
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies ; African, American and Oceania Studies
• Term: from 2015 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 288799248

The project investigates both the historical emergence and contemporary persistence of competing national and Native narratives of land as property in U.S.-American law, literature, and culture. By focusing unequivocally on property and proprietary relations as fundamental issues in the study of U.S.-American culture, the project seeks to strengthen the study of property as a neglected research perspective in the U.S.-American literary and cultural studies. The aim is to develop a more robust and self-reflexive analytical and methodological framework for the study of property in literary and cultural discourses.Based on the observation that the ongoing negotiation of competing concepts of property and especially the struggle between opposing claims of possession in regard to land have been foundational as well as formative for U.S.-American literature and culture, the project tries to rejoin the prehistory [Vorgeschichte] and the consequences [Wirkungsgeschichte] of a crucial period in the struggle between national and Native sovereignty, history, and identity, i.e. the sequence of Supreme Court decisions known as the 'Marshall Trilogy" (1823-32) and the subsequent politics of Indian Removal during the Jacksonian period. The project investigates the specific ways in which the narrative conceptualization of history in historical, literary and legal texts is used to legitimize particular claims of ownership and possession of land as property. The basic mode of legitimization as well as conceptualization of property consists in recounting stories about it, and hence, historical narratives of property serve as claims within the larger context of contestation of property interests and rights. Articulating an intensely interdisciplinary approach, the project combines methods and insights from literary and cultural studies (esp. American Studies and Native Studies) with socio-historical perspectives, as well as critical legal studies, legal anthropology, and property studies.Since the relationship between property and literature is contingent on particular historical and cultural situations, its inherent dynamics may only be explored through a synchronous analysis of literary/legal texts produced during a specific historical period. Therefore one of the sub-projects "Imagination and Entitlement: State Histories and the Historical Novel in the U.S. 1763 to 1830" will analyze early state histories and their impact on the formation of subsequent literary and legal narratives of property. Since the constitutive role of literature in the conceptualization of property can only be thrown into sharp relief by studying the literary representation of property regimes across historical periods, the second sub-project "From Removal to Indigenism: Property Discourses in Native American Removal Literature" will be concerned with literary representations of the Indian Removal in Native texts from the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: USA
• Cooperation Partner: Professorin Dr. Leti Volpp