Law’s terra, race, and the will to empire

ABSTRACT

Mawani has penned a breathtaking book that challenges the terra-centric understanding of modern (Western) law through an anti-colonial narrative of a ship, its passengers, and the ambitiously defiant journey they took together across the timespace of the erstwhile British Empire. Five years after its publication, this book review seeks to revisit this narrative and distinguish Mawani's work as pathbreaking for the theorisation of law at a planetary scale in ways that also account for the 'non-human' and 'more-than-human' relations. Unlike many newer strands of scholarship seeking to theorise more-than-human dimensions of law- be it in ecological or technological contexts- Mawani's novel 'oceans as method' approach refuses to erase the centrality of racialised violence to the legal empire, including in law's foundational concepts like time, jurisdiction, object and subject. The last section offers some reflections on how engagements with the contexts of caste could have rendered the work richer.

KEYWORDS:

• Legal history
• legal theory
• more–than–human
• oceans as method
• race

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Tejumola Olanian, ‘On “Post-Colonial Discourse” an Introduction (1993) 16(4) Callaloo (Autumn) 743; Kwame Anthony Appiah, ‘Is the Post- in Postmodern the Post- in Postcolonial?’ (1991) 17(2) Critical Inquiry (Winter) 336, 348; Anne McClintock, ‘The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term “Post-Colonialism”’ (1992) 31/32 Social Text 84.

2 Not to be confused with Indigenous understandings of law being rooted in the land. See for example, John Borrows, ‘Indigenous Legal Traditions in Canada’ (2005) 19(1) Journal of Law and Policy 167; CF Black, The Land Is the Source of the Law: A Dialogic Encounter with Indigenous Jurisprudence (Routledge 2010); Ram Dayal Munda, Adi-dharam: Religious Beliefs of the Aivasis of India (Adivaani 2014).

3 See for example, Margaret Davies, EcoLaw: Legality, Life, and the Normativity of Nature (Taylor & Francis 2022); Cormac Cullinan, ‘Earth Jurisprudence’ in Lavanya Rajamani and Jacqueline Peel (eds), The Oxford Handbook of International Environmental Law (Oxford University Press 2021); Anna Grear, ‘“Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Cthuluscene”: Re-Encountering Environmental Law and Its “Subject” with Haraway and New Materialism’ in Louis J Kotzé (ed), Environmental Law and Governance for the Anthropocene (Hart Publishing 2017); Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, ‘Law’s Spatial Turn: Geography, Justice, and a Certain Fear of Space’ (2011) 7(2) Law, Culture and the Humanities 187.

4 See for example, Judith E Koons, ‘Earth Jurisprudence: The Moral Value of Nature’ (2008) 25 (2) Pace Environmental Law Review 263; Davies (n 3); Nicole Rogers and Michelle Maloney (eds), Law as if Earth Really Mattered: The Wild Law Judgment Project (GlassHouse 2014); Anna Grear (ed), Posthuman Legalities: New Materialism and Law Beyond the Human (Edward Elgar 2021); Kathleen Birrell and Daniel Matthews, ‘Laws for the Anthropocene: Orientations, Encounters, Imaginaries’ (2020) 31 Law and Critique 233.

5 There are fairly well-documented histories and presents of the entanglements of environmentalism, ecocentric, and white supremacist and colonial discourses; see for example, Jessica Hernandez, Fresh Banana Leaves (North Atlantic Books 2022); Kavita Philip, Civilizing Natures: Race, Resources, and Modernity in Colonial South India (MIT Press 2003); Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life (Haymarket Books 1999); Zoe Todd, ‘Indigenizing the Anthropocene’ in TBA21–Academy (eds), Ocean Archive (Open Humanities Press 2015); Farhana Sultana, ‘Whose Growth in Whose Planetary Boundaries? Decolonising Planetary Justice in the Anthropocene’ (2023) 10(2) Geography and Environment 1; Tamara L Mix, ‘The Greening of White Separatism: Use of Environmental Themes to Elaborate and Legitimize Extremist Discourse’ (2009) 4(2) Nature and Culture 1; Beth Gardiner, ‘White Supremacy Goes Green’ The New York Times (28 February 2020) <www.nytimes.com/2020/02/28/opinion/sunday/far-right-climate-change.html>; Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier, Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience (A K Press 1995).

6 In their article, Tuck and Yang illustrate how ‘playing Indian’ is still deployed as part of the settler moves to innocence; see, Eve Tuck and K Wayne Yang, ‘Decolonization is not a Metaphor’ (2012) 1(1) Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1.

7 Jotirao Govindrao Phule, Slavery in the Civilised British Government Under the Cloak of Brahmanism (1873) (PG Patil tr, Education Department, Government of Maharashtra 1991); Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, What Congress and Gandhi have Done for the Untouchables (Samyak Prakashan 1946); WEB Du Bois, ‘The Papers of W. E. B. Du Bois’ (Microfilming Corporation of America 1980), reel 58, frames 00467–00468; Ambrose Pinto, ‘UN Conference Against Racism: Is Caste Race?’ (2001) 36(3) Economic and Political Weekly 2817; Daniel Immerwahr, ‘Caste or Colony? Indianizing Race in the United States’ (2007) 4(2) Modern Intellectual History 275; George S Schuyler, ‘Views and Reviews’ Pittsburgh Courier (12 September 1931); Nico Slate, ‘Translating Race and Caste’ (2011) 24(1) Journal of Historical Sociology 1. See also, Murali Shanmugavelan, ‘Race and Caste’ in Critical Caste and Technology Studies <https://criticalcastetechstudies.net/syllabusdetail/9> accessed 20 September 2023.

8 See eg, Aimee Carrillo Rowe and Eve Tuck, ‘Settler Colonialism and Cultural Studies: Ongoing Settlement, Cultural Production, and Resistance’ (2017) 17(1) Cultural Studies <---> Critical Methodologies 3, 5.

9 Anand Teltumbde, Dalits: Past, Present, Future (Taylor & Francis 2016); Thenmozhi Soundararajan, The Trauma of Caste (North Atlantic Books 2022); Dolly Kikon, ‘Dirty Food: Racism and Casteism in India’ (2022) 45(2) Ethnic and Racial Studies 278; Anand Teltumbde, ‘Hindutva Agenda and Dalits’ in Ram Puniyani (ed), Religion, Power and Violence: Expression of Politics in Contemporary Times (Sage 2005); Gail Omvedt, Understanding Caste: From Ambedkar to Buddha and Beyond (Orient BlackSwan 2012).

10 See for example, Alexandra Lewis and Marie Lall, ‘From Decolonisation and Authoritarianism: The Co-Option of Decolonial Agenda in Higher Education by Right-Wing Nationalist Elites in Russia and India’ (2023) Higher Education 1 <https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10734-023-01074-0> accessed 22 September 2023.