Rose Casey, "Aesthetic Impropriety: Property Law and Postcolonial Style" (Fordham UP, 2025)

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Sep 12, 2025

Rose Casey, an Associate Professor of English at West Virginia University, delves into her book, Aesthetic Impropriety, which examines the interconnections between property law, colonial legacies, and literary innovation. She discusses how contemporary reforms are addressing legal injustices linked to land and resources in places like the Niger Delta, India, and South Africa. Casey introduces the concept of aesthetic impropriety, highlighting how literature can challenge and reshape harmful property laws, revealing a powerful intersection of law, culture, and activism.

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INSIGHT

Property Law's Colonial Reach

Property law shaped by British colonialism continues to structure dispossession globally across land, resources, and personhood.
Literary works and legal reforms interact, with literature often prefiguring and shaping legal change.

ANECDOTE

Roy's Novel Sparked The Project

Rose Casey began her project after noticing The God of Small Things was deeply engaged with property law and inheritance disputes.
That hunch led her to trace how novels sometimes preempt legal reforms on inheritance and gender justice.

INSIGHT

Aesthetic Impropriety Defined

'Aesthetic impropriety' names a shared, non-proprietary logic across literature and law resisting colonial ownership norms.
The concept links experimental postcolonial aesthetics to legal reforms that reject enclosure and exclusivity.

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Aesthetic Impropriety: Property Law and Postcolonial Style (Fordham UP, 2025) analyzes vanguard legal actions and literary innovations to reveal contemporary reforms to property law that are undoing law’s colonial legacies. Casey traces precise legal histories across distinct jurisdictions throughout the anglophone world, revealing the connection between land law and petroleum extraction in the Niger Delta, inheritance and divorce laws and gender inequality in India, intellectual property law and Indigenous dispossession in South Africa, and admiralty law and racialized non-personhood in the English Atlantic. In response to these manifold forms of dispossession, significant reforms are underway, including through common lawsuits, statutory reform, and proposed changes to legal doctrine.

Casey develops the concept of aesthetic impropriety to identify shared structures of thought across legal and literary venues. She shows that writers of poetry and prose are also transforming harmful property laws: in Nigeria, Ben Okri and Chigozie Obioma have articulated symbiotic ecological relationships that are also evidenced in recent actions against petroleum companies; in India, Arundhati Roy’s challenge to divorce laws has preempted similar attempts at reform in Parliament; in South Africa, Zoë Wicomb theorized protections for Indigenous modes of creative production nineteen years before they were signed into law; and in the Americas, M. NourbeSe Philip has proposed a novel method of achieving justice for the one hundred fifty enslaved people who were killed in the 1781 Zong massacre.
Aesthetic Impropriety makes a convincing case for literature’s generative capacities and registers the enduring significance of the postcolonial as a necessary framework for understanding globalized inequality in the twenty-first century. By analyzing shared legal and aesthetic transformations, Aesthetic Impropriety argues that law and literature play vital roles in creating anticolonial world orders.

Arnab Dutta Roy is Assistant Professor of World Literature and Postcolonial Theory at Florida Gulf Coast University.

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