Strategic Working Groups

Redress || 2004

In Fall 2004, seven members of the UC Berkeley community gathered for weekly meetings to discuss the topic of redress—the question of reparation or compensation for historical injustice. The goals of the group were twofold: to gather together scholars from the humanities, social sciences, and professional schools with interests in the past, justice, and reconstruction; and to foster a discussion of some of the different ways that these scholars and others in their respective fields think about specific instances of historical injustice and the possibility of their remedy. The Redress group’s ongoing task is to open up critical dialogue on questions of injury, justice, and closure that have yet to be posed within the traditional disciplines, and to address problems that have been either denied or repressed within liberal historiographic and philosophical critique.

Over the course of the semester, the group read and discussed works from a variety of critical and political angles, the large majority of which tended to pose questions that specific disciplines and methods appear to have only weakly theorized before now. Scholarship specifically devoted to the topic of redress, while without exception relevant, was not always the most intellectually productive basis for the group’s discussions. What was often most stimulating was work on topics that appeared to fall outside of, or to pose conceptual challenges to, established Western mechanisms of justice. For example, with the help of Achille Mbembe’s provocative synthesis of critical theory and postcolonial historiography, the group was able to engage the problems of sovereignty entailed in the remediation of stateless violence (for example, the violence of “non-state” actors). How is it that such violence troubles models of justice that assume a relation between discrete victims and a hegemonic state? Similarly, Joan Dayan’s critical genealogies of the law not only laid bare the historical linkages between the slave and the prisoner, but also opened up a conversation within the group about Anglo-American law’s investment in the structural reproduction of negative being. What is more, the group considered the implications of Jeremy Waldron’s “supersession thesis,” which asserts that historic injustice may be overtaken by changes in circumstances, so that a situation that was unjust when it was brought about may conflict with what justice requires at a later time. This challenged group members to consider that those who are burdened by the history of a historical injustice might nonetheless have to cede the grounds of their claims. But it also urged the group to ponder the depth of the challenge analytic political philosophy poses to historical theories of justice.

Other critical challenges for the group involve (1) the conceptualization of history and injury, or confronting what is lost when you rethink processes such as the customary lack of access to resources or a racial segregation that has been legally enforced as an era—for example, “the apartheid era,” or the period of “Jim Crow segregation;” and (2) the project of outlining the shift from a “civil rights” discourse that views law as a vehicle for the transformation of society to a “redress” discourse focused on claims for things that can be measured—on a monetarization of social debt (such as reparations) that reduces justice to a “metrics.”

About the Group Members

Joining group organizer Stephen Best (Department of English) were Marianne Constable (Department of Rhetoric), Laurel Fletcher (Boalt Hall School of Law and the Human Rights Center), Saidiya Hartman (Department of English), Christopher Kutz (Jurisprudence & Social Policy Program), Annie McClanahan (graduate student, Department of English), and Michael Rubenstein (Department of English).