Epes Lecture

 

Scales of Ownership:

Identity in the Shadow of Property

 

Ravit Reichman

Brown University

 

Why do we come to feel possessive over intangibles—nations, identity, memory—that, legally, we cannot own? How and why does property become a means of doing justice in the modern world? This lecture takes up these questions through two related claims: first, that property in the modern era comes into view predominantly through loss rather than acquisition; and second, that many of our contemporary anxieties and debates can be understood as property disputes, suggesting that property far exceeds the parameters of law. To explain this modern relationship to property, I examine the experience of identity theft, which is technically not theft at all but fraud. Yet the fact that we name—and by implication, experience—it as theft reveals something peculiarly modern about the connections between individuals and their things, and more trenchantly, between the modern sense of self and the anxiety over self-possession. We might recognize this notion of the propertied self in legal cases, from defamation of character to intellectual property. The stakes of identity theft amount to more than financial vulnerability, tapping into deeper anxieties about who we are and where we belong. Reading the 2009 Supreme Court decision on identity theft Flores-Figueroa v. United States alongside instances of racial passing in fiction and public culture, I unpack the propertied rhetoric at the heart of our identity claims.