(Source: University of Michigan Press)
The University
of Michigan Press will publish a book on “how courts repeat historical fictions
that maintain sources of colonial power.”
ABOUT THE BOOK
Archiving
Sovereignty shows how courts use fiction in their treatment of sovereign
violence. Law’s complicity with imperial and neocolonial practices occurs when
courts inscribe and repeat the fabulous tales that provide an alibi for archaic
sovereign acts that persist in the present. The United Kingdom’s depopulation
of islands in the Indian Ocean to serve the United States’ neoimperial
interests, Australia’s exile and abandonment of refugees on remote islands, the
failure to acknowledge genocidal acts or colonial dispossession, and the
memorial work of the South African Constitution after apartheid are all
sustained by historical fictions. This history-work of law constitutes an
archive where sovereign violence is mediated, dissimulated, and sustained.
Stewart Motha extends the concept of the “archive,” as site of origin and
source of authority, to signifying what law does in preserving and disavowing
the past at the same time.
Sovereignty is
often cast as a limit-concept, constituent force, determining the boundary of
law. Archiving Sovereignty reverses this to explain how judicial pronouncements
inscribe and sustain extravagant claims to exceptionality and sovereign
solitude. This wide-ranging, critical work distinguishes between myths that
sustain neocolonial orders and fictions that generate new forms of political
and ethical life.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stewart Motha is
Professor of Law at the School of Law, Birkbeck, University of London.
More information here
No comments:
Post a Comment