Roundtable Discussion
Rose Casey in conversation with Leila Neti, Shane Chalmers, and Daniel Elam
Speakers:
Rose Casey, Associate Professor of English, West Virginia University
Leila Neti, Irma M. and Jay F. Price Professor in English, Occidental College
Shane Chalmers, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Law, HKU
Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Wednesday, October 22, 2025
Time: 10:00 am Hong Kong Time (10:00 pm/21 Oct/Morgantown)
Venue: On Zoom
Across Africa, Asia, and the Americas, English-derived property laws are being transformed by writers as well as legal actors. In Aesthetic Impropriety: Property Law and Postcolonial Style, Rose Casey analyzes vanguard legal actions and literary innovations to identify a pattern of anticolonial property law reforms in Nigeria, India, South Africa, and the English Atlantic. Describing these legal transformations as productively “improper,” and identifying a similar, aesthetic impropriety in postcolonial literary works, Casey shows that literature is involved in undoing property law’s colonial legacies. By reading fiction and poetry alongside landmark legal cases and instruments, Aesthetic Impropriety argues that both law and literature play vital roles in creating anticolonial world orders.
Rose Casey is associate professor of English at West Virginia University in the United States. She is author of Aesthetic Impropriety: Property Law and Postcolonial Style, published by Fordham University Press in 2025. Her scholarship has appeared widely in academic and public venues. She is working on her next book, Inheriting Dispossession: South African Succession Law and Literature’s Narrative Temporalities.
This event is co-organised by Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC), Department of Comparative Literature, and the Faculty of Law, The University of Hong Kong.
For updates on future events hosted by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, please visit https://www.csgc.hku.hk/
Follow us on:
– Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/csgc.hku
– Instagram: @csgc.hku