Stanford Humanities Center
Jisha Menon is Professor of Theater and Performance Studies, and, by courtesy, of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. She is the author of Brutal Beauty: Aesthetics and Aspiration in Urban India (Northwestern UP, 2021) and The Performance of Nationalism: India, Pakistan and the Memory of Partition (Cambridge UP, 2013). She is also co-editor of two volumes: Violence Performed: Local Roots and Global Routes of Conflict (Palgrave-Macmillan Press, 2009) and Performing the Secular: Religion, Representation, and Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
SHC Project
The Cultural and Legal Arts of Personhood
This book project explores how legal practices entrench a particular liberal topology of personhood, and how this conception departs from other societies where persons are conceived in more plural and discontinuous ways. While the purpose of punishment may be retributive or utilitarian, rehabilitative, or symbolic, it also inaugurates a moral subject at the heart of its sanction. The elastic legal category of personhood derives from persona, the Latin word for mask or false face worn by actors in Roman theater, which reminds us of the central role of artifice within the concept. Attending to the fictive constitution of the person within the law allows us to highlight the artifice, indeed, the aesthetics that are central to jurisprudence. Legal actors deploy performance to reinforce, activate, or challenge conceptions of personhood within legal settings. This book examines “confessional performance,” where the legal actor crafts a narrative performance that stitches together a particular topology of personhood.
