Collection
Subjectivities, Religion, Discrimination: Spaces and Lexical Imaginaries for Ubiquitous Justice
In this vein, the ensuing intermingling of multiple semantic/spatial domains, in turn, unavoidably ends up affecting the alleged ‘corralling power’ of categorization, particularly legal categorization, engendering what might be called ‘clouds’ of injustice and/or axio-semantic inconsistency. It is precisely along these ambiguous and nebulous borders that axiological/linguistic conflicts concerning religious symbols are located, due to the internal/external divide drawn by the imagery of secularization. Something similar occurs in all situations in which the same subject, through their actions, connects, straddles, or traverses different universes of discourse, different linguistic circuits, different semiotic and experiential landscapes. What is lacking, in these cases, is a ‘culture of translation’, which is also integral to the ability to project a cross-cultural gaze on the dynamics of experience. This is a crucial problem within contemporary culture-scapes, which are also nomo-scapes, and which, partly by virtue of networked communication, escape the symbolic-territorial subdivisions inherited from the geographical imaginary of the past. The corresponding symbolic and legal apparatuses often turn into bans (e.g., when related to race and religion) that inconsistently attempt to curb the semantic and legal relevance of semiotic relational and meaningful threads projected into the past and the ‘elsewhere:’ the same threads that are instead presentified by people's ‘subjectivities on the move’ but always fall under the lens of law in one or another institutional ‘here and now.’
‘Translation,’ in the light of the above, assumes an inner political significance because it proves to be both intrinsically and experientially interspatial. This also because ‘trans-lating,’ etymologically intended as both spatial and discursive transferring, is the source and efficient cause of the pluralism that, travelling on people’s shoulders, populates the circuits of meaning, even within national borders. The forensic moment is, as it were, the point of convergence where these semantic-spatial interpenetrations come to the fore, more often than not in a pathological manner. At the same time, this is the place where asymmetries emerge between space and meaning, legal subjectivity and models of legal and axiological categorization, and so on. The workshop contributions show how the universalizing aspiration of modernity appears at odds with itself, especially when subjected to an attempt at rethinking from below, ethically and politically emancipated from the ‘pigeonholing time-space semantics’ that are coextensive with global capitalism and its history.
Editors
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Rob Kahn
Rob Kahn is a Professor of Law at St. Thomas University, where he teaches Lawyering Skills, Lawyering Skills for LLM Students and Privacy Law. He has a JD from New York University School and a PhD in Political Science from Johns Hopkins University. His 2004 book Holocaust Denial and the Law: A Comparative Study examined Holocaust-denial litigation in France, Germany, Canada and the US. His scholarship has addressed cross-burning laws, defamation of religions debate, memory laws, European bans of the hijab and burqa and mask wearing. His current research focuses on critical race theory bans and post-COVID mask wearing laws RAKAHN@stthomas.edu
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Simona Stano
Simona Stano is Associate Professor of Semiotics at the University of Turin and vice-Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Communication. In 2018, she was awarded a Marie Curie Global Fellowship for a research project on the semiotic analysis of food and digital communication. She deals mainly with food semiotics, body semiotics and communication studies, has published several papers, edited volumes (including special issues of top journals such as Semiotica, Lexia and Signata) and 2 monographs (I sensi del cibo, 2018; Eating the Other. Translations of the Culinary Code, 2015) on these topics. simona.stano@unito.it
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Mario Ricca
Mario Ricca is full professor in Intercultural Law at University of Parma, Italy. He is managing director of the online journal ‘Calumet — Intercultural Law and Humanities Review.’ He has published several books on intercultural law. His research areas interplay among law, anthropology, semiotics, and geography. mario.ricca@icloud.com
