How Do We Inherit?

About the Theme

Sara Ahmed reminds us that etymologically, inheritance is what sticks to us, and Jacques Derrida underscores how it always involves decision: inheritance is a process. 

This question may focus on philosophical and speculative questions about traditions, canons, and curricula. It might include considerations of both endurance and disruption in a wide variety of ways. Asking this question might entail thinking in detail about the complexities of inheritance in political, psychological, legal, religious, or social terms.

The question invites attention to the afterlives of slavery (Saidiya Hartman), the ongoing dispossessions of settler coloniality (which many settlers barely register consciously), and tensions among religious traditions and the geopolitically adjacent societies organized (however loosely or tightly) around them. It moves toward the economics and legality of inheritance, broadly construed.

It may focus on “origins” or foundation (which may mean explicitly rejecting logics of the origin or foundations), or ask about what it is that we “owe” ancestors, how we can ethically live toward visions of sociality that are passed down.

It could include attention to monuments, archives, placenames, prophets, scriptures, initiators of movements or schools, or a focus on libraries, archives, and museums as orderings of knowledge, often complicit with interests of states and dominant social forces.