In this talk, Samira Spatzek will discuss her forthcoming book Unruly Narrative: On Private Property and Self-Making. In it, she examines the intricate connections between modern Western self-making and liberal ideas of private property, offering an intervention into questions of the white liberal Human. Understood here to be intimately bound by the formations of European liberalism, Atlantic slavery, and settler colonial expansion in the New World, the talk will consider the importance of narrative for the liberal subject and argue that notions of self-ownership and the ability to own others are fundamental to the liberal subject’s coming-into-being. Spatzek traces private property’s positioning and formative powers as she turns to Toni Morrison’s historical novel A Mercy (2008). She will closely examine its representation of colonial North America for the ways it scrutinizes complex entanglements between power, race, and subjectivity that are so fundamental to US society till this day. Ultimately, Spatzek’s reading of A Mercy positions the novel as a key literary text that generates a fundamental philosophical and political critique of the connections between self-making and private property — a critique that refuses the Human grammar of being that Atlantic slavery induced.

Samira Spatzek is a postdoctoral researcher of American studies and fashion studies at the Cluster of Excellence 2020 “Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective” at FU Berlin. She studied English-Speaking Cultures and American Studies at the Universities of Bremen, Sheffield, and Groningen, and holds a PhD from the University of Bremen. In 2016, she was a visiting research fellow at the Callie House Research Center for the Study of Global Black Cultures and Politics and African American and Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. She won a fellowship for her doctoral research by the Rosa-Luxemburg-Foundation and is currently a member of the editorial team of the peer-reviewed e-journal COPAS: Current Objectives in Postgraduate American Studies. She is the author of Unruly Narrative: On Private Property and Self-Making (forthcoming with DeGruyter "American Frictions").