Finding inspiration (under the sun)
This year, we decided to document some of our readings during the mid-year break and share it on the blog. Although the places where our blog team members read are different, both geographically and seasonally, for all authors the readings come from a moment of pause, introspection and from which they try to reflect further.
After 2020, this is the second reading list we share on the blog – at that time it was still labelled summer reading list, but the (geographical) extension of our team base in the last years has rendered this trope fitting only some of our members, and the same may be true for you reading them. Still, for the pieces which will be published during the next couple of days, inspiration was in many cases also found under the sun
We will present these exciting texts to you in two parts. Both recently published works and classics are included in this year’s reading list with a wide variety of books and thoughts. We hope you enjoy reading them and would also like to encourage you to post your summer readings on our X-channel and perhaps write a few words about them.
Would Hart and Dworkin Argue if They Had a Bowl of Ice Cream (Each)?
Ronald Dworkin, Law’s Empire (Belknap Press 1986)
Polina Kulish
It’s hard to imagine legal theory without Ronald Dworkin. It’s hard to imagine summer without ice cream. In an attempt to bridge an epistemic gap between philosophy and fun, summer and re-reading Dworkin for my PhD thesis footnotes, I intend to turn it into a quest of exploring the nuances of ice cream flavor. And for this, Dworkin surprisingly provides guidance.
Famously, in Law’s Empire, Dworkin explores the nature of law and its role in society, challenging readers to think deeply about justice, morality, and interpretation. He introduces the concept of “law as integrity,” arguing that judges should interpret laws based on principles that best fit and justify the legal system as a whole. In a probably less quoted passage, Dworkin mused: “I do not believe (though some people do) that flavors of ice cream have genuine aesthetic value, so I would say only that I prefer rum raisin and would not add (though some of them would) that rum raisin is “really” or “objectively” the best flavor” (p. 81).
Although Dworkin would disagree with the philosophical premise of this escapade, I want to judge this myself. Could rum raisin truly be the best ice cream flavor?
This summer, as you revisit Dworkin, consider pairing your reading with a rum raisin ice cream. After all, as Ray Bradbury wrote in Farewell Summer, “I never in my life argued with a piece of cake or a bowl of ice cream.” Would it leave us without a history of philosophical debate? Perhaps. Or we’d start arguing about ice-creams.
Cover up and Stay in the Shade!
Kenji Yoshino, Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights (Random House 2006)
Cathérine Van de Graaf
When temperatures start rising, we are all reminded to cover our skin with a thick layer of sunscreen, wear a cap and stay in the shade. To expose ourselves uncovered to the outside world can have a detrimental effect on our body and health and ought to be avoided. For some, this pressure to cover is not seasonal but permanent and not to prevent the effects of damaging sunrays but instead brought about by the majoritarian penalisation of difference. This process where people tone down or hide appearances or elements of their stigmatized identity is dealt with in the book ‘Covering’ by NYU Constitutional Law professor and director of the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging, Kenji Yoshino. He borrows the term ‘covering’ from sociologist Erving Goffman who introduced it in 1963 to refer to how individuals minimise aspects of their identity to fit into the dominant group. Minority groups receive the message that assimilating to a (illusionary) dominant norm will be rewarded. Yoshino stresses the need to investigate whether there is in fact any need to impose a covering demand and argues that coerced assimilation coming from a reflexive conformity does not suffice to establish such a need.
While the book is from 2006, Yoshino offers perspectives that remain a relevant read for anyone interested in the limits of discrimination law. He discusses that while law can protect against categorical forms of discrimination, it remains a blunt instrument that is ill-equipped to deal with subtler forms of bias and examples of covering (whether self-imposed or not). Law can assist in cases of discrimination based on an immutable criterion (what someone is) but often does not protect the mutable practices that are connected to these protected grounds (how this identity is expressed).
As a literature student who only later turned to law, Yoshino stresses the power of the literary narrative to bring about transformation when law is not an adequate means to do so. Throughout the book, (personal) stories accompany legal discussion. Yoshino draws on his own experiences as an Asian American gay man in legal academia as well as on those around him to paint a very intimate picture of what covering can look like and what it can contribute to on a micro level.
The Rebellious Branch of the Olive Tree
Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld Publications 2007)
Fatima Mehmood
Do numbers tell a story or does a story’s periphalised details unravel its truth? Pappé provides a historiographical account of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine before, during and after 1948. Six months, 800,000 people uprooted, 531 villages destroyed, and 11 neighbourhoods emptied. Behind these numbers are stories of betrayal, despair, tragedy, separation, and humiliation not just of people and buildings, but of the indigenous flora as well.
Pappé chronicles how the ethnic cleansing of Palestine was accompanied by the cleansing and substitution of trees as well, wherein the indigenous olive trees were replaced by pines and conifers by the JNF, in a bid to make the ethnically cleansed areas look European (p.227). Fifty-six years later, however, the flora rebelled – olive branches were found growing in the middle of broken trunks of the new species (p.228). This organic reverberation of the ethnic cleansing operations was largely overlooked in the polarized reception of the book – critics have debated about Pappé’s methodologies, approaches and narratives but reading this book eighteen years after it was published, I returned to this part about the revolt of the olive trees over and over again – perhaps nature cannot be truly and fully dispossessed and expelled, it almost always finds its way back, in the most unlikely ways, almost in defiance.
Pappé contextualises his book against the backdrop of what he terms the “memoricide” of the Nakba – how it has been forgotten in the collective international memory. He remarks that one of the reasons behind the persistent denial of the Nakba is the term itself – connoting a “catastrophe” but leaving out the cause or actor behind that catastrophe, as if it was self-perpetuating (p.xvii). This made me reflect on two questions. One – is there such a phenomenon as the collective international memory and if so, who orchestrates its content and how can it be universalized with any veneer of certainty what is seemingly left out of it? Two – isn’t a term coined by the people affected themselves logically the most accurate in describing an event – a term reflecting a continued lived reality, as opposed to what Lon. L. Fuller termed a “datum projecting itself into the human experience”?
Such and the more severe fait accomplis – like annihilating complete Palestinian villages – created by the Israeli government and military at the time renders moot the question of the refugees’ right to return – return where? As Mohammed El-Kurd put it, “she went shelter to shelter. I wonder, was it the shelter that ran away from her?” (Rifqa, p.19).
