(Source: CRC Press)
CRC Press is publishing “Law and
Resistance: Toward a Performative Epistemology of the Political Trial”.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Taking Michel Foucault’s
genealogical analysis of power and resistance as its starting point, the book
asks, from below, is there something in the very nature of law – that is, in
its discursive and institutional dynamics, in its spatial, material, and
temporal coordinates; in its own conceptual categories, claims, mechanisms, and
processes – that makes it something more than the mere instrument and armature
of power? If those in power can utilize the devices of law and justice to
achieve political ends, isn’t there something about these devices that can
accommodate fresh articulations? Contending that there are, indeed, discursive,
spatial, and temporal resources that can be reconfigured and redeployed as a
counter-power and counter-discourse against sovereignty, the book takes as its
focus the judicial apparatus; and, more specifically, the concept of the
political or show trial. Examining the landmark political trials of Nelson
Mandela, Marwan Barghouti, and Bobby Seale, the political trial, it is argued,
evinces a crisis of law and sovereignty: a moment where the submerged crisis of
sovereignty appears all across the normative structures of the system. The book
thus considers the different ways in which a politics of resistance is enabled
in the courtroom: as it uncovers a performative logic that contingently
conditions, and thus breaks open, law’s otherwise closed normativity.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
1. Law and Resistance: Beyond a
Normative Conception of Law
2. The Political Trial
3. Law and Resistance: Toward a
Performative Epistemology of the Political Trial
4. ‘Black man in the white man’s
court’
5. Terrorism and Resistance on
Trial
6. Slave-Owners as Founding
Fathers: Counter-history in the Courtroom
7. Conclusion
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