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Abstract
This article introduces the special issue of Law & Literature on “Colonial Legal Imaginaries | Southern Literary Futures”. The aim is to advance two imperative tasks. The first, analytic, task is to pay attention to the diversity of colonial imaginaries across the very different terrains, literatures, and epistemologies of the so-called South. Rather than continue to impose a Eurocentric canon on the domain of law and literature, the argument here is that we need to better immerse ourselves in the diversity of colonial imaginaries from places whose experiences were as different as Indigenous Australia, India under the Raj, African game reserves, or the post-conquest Americas. The second, ethical and aesthetic, task is to accept literature’s invitation not simply to document colonial, or for that matter post-colonial, ideologies, but to reimagine them. The realms of literature and art represent a crucial opportunity to talk back to power through the very modalities of fantasy and imagination, myth and story, that have been so indispensable to its maintenance. Each author in this collection wholeheartedly contributes to these two tasks, combining an analytical expansion of the past with a creative ethical engagement with the present and the future.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 See in particular Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society (Polity Press, 1987); Chiara Bottici, Imaginal Politics (Columbia University Press, 2015).
2 Frederic Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (Verso, 2005), 205.
3 Paul Arthur, “Antipodean Myths Transformed: The Evolution of Australian Identity,” History Compass, vol 5, no. 6 (2007): 1864.
4 Alfred Hiatt, Terra Incognita: Mapping the Antipodes before 1600 (University of Chicago Press, 2008); William Eisler, The Furthest Shore: Images of Terra Australia from the Middle Ages to Captain Cook (Cambridge University Press, 1995).
5 Hiatt, Terra Incognita, 47.
6 Hiatt, Terra Incognita, 58-9. Macrobius was not the first to refer to an antipodean people as well as an antipodean place, but he went further than most in trying to imagine, not only their existence, but also their perspective. As Hiatt writes: “The logic of antipodal symmetry encouraged Macrobius to imagine the imagination of antipodal others: an imagination in which, momentarily, the ecumenical we are laughed out of existence”: 46.
7 Edward Said, Orientalism (Pantheon, 1978); Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (Blackwell, 1969).
8 Peter Fitzpatrick, The Mythology of Modern Law (Routledge, 1992).
9 Even amongst contemporary commentators, the usual history is still too often a tale of progression from the “unknown” to the “known” – from fanciful speculation and wild imaginings to empirical observation and inductive reasoning – rather than a view of different ways of knowing, and of how the imaginary shapes what is known as much as what is unknown.
10 Said, Orientalism, 121. On the “metastases of myth”, see Desmond Manderson, “The Metastases of Myth: Legal Images as Transitional Phenomena”, Law and Critique, vol. 26 (2015).
11 Said, Orientalism, 123.
12 Fitzpatrick, Mythology.
13 Said, Orientalism, 123.
14 Hiatt, Terra Incognita, 14.
15 Said, Orientalism.
16 Luis Marin, Portrait of the King (University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 9.
17 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (Pantheon Books, 1971).
18 Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide (Routledge, 2014).
19 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel”, in Michael Holquist (trans and ed), The Dialogic Imagination (University of Texas Press, 1981), 269-422.
20 Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law”, in Drucilla Cornell, Michael Rosenfeld and David Gray Carlson (eds), Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (Routledge, 1992), 3, 14.
21 Manderson, this issue.
22 Manderson, this issue.
23 Manderson, this issue.
24 Manderson, this issue.
25 Manderson, this issue.
26 Marin, Portrait, 1-12; see also Louis Marin, On Representation (Stanford University Press, 2002).
27 Manderson, this issue.
28 van Rijswijk, this issue.
29 On the “risk” of “reification of contexts” in the literature on the imaginary, see Bottici, Imaginal Politics, 39.
30 This metaphor also helps to understand how the imaginary can be both boundless (which is why we continue to speak of the imaginary in the singular) and yet internally differentiated (which is why we also speak of imaginaries in the plural).
31 Baxter, this issue.
32 Baxter, this issue.
33 Section 4(1) of the India Press Act 1910 (Imp).
34 Bhatia, this issue.
35 Bhatia, this issue.
36 Tom Conley, “Introduction”, in Louis Marin, Portrait of the King (University of Minnesota Press, 1988), v; Desmond Manderson, “Bodies in the Water: On Reading Images More Sensibly”, Law & Literature, vol 27, no. 2 (2015): 280.
37 Ambelin Kwaymullina, “Literature, Resistance, and First Nations Futures: Storytelling from an Australian Indigenous Women’s Standpoint in the Twenty-First Century and Beyond”, Westerly, vol 63, no. 2 (2018), 152.
38 Joseph R Slaughter, Human Rights Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (Fordham University Press, 2007).
39 Gevers, this issue.
40 Gevers, this issue.
41 Gevers, this issue.
42 van Rijswijk, this issue.
43 van Rijswijk, this issue.
44 van Rijswijk, this issue.
45 van Rijswijk, this issue.
46 Neti, this issue.
47 Neti, this issue; see also Matthew Craven, “The Time of Revolution: Decolonisation, Heterodox International Legal Historiography and the Problem of the Contemporary”, in Shane Chalmers and Sundhya Pahuja, Routledge Handbook of International Law and the Humanities (Routledge, 2021).
48 Neti, this issue.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Shane Chalmers
Dr Shane Chalmers is Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law, and Senior Lecturer at the University of Adelaide Law School. His work has contributed to the fields of law and humanities, law and colonialism, law and development, and critical legal theory. He is also a long-standing member, and currently a Vice President, of the Law, Literature and Humanities Association of Australasia.
Desmond Manderson
Professor Desmond Manderson FRSC, FAAL, FASSA is jointly appointed in the ANU Colleges of Law and of Arts & Social Sciences at the Australian National University. He directs the Centre for Law, Arts and the Humanities, designing innovative interdisciplinary courses with English, philosophy, art theory and history, political theory, and beyond. His books include From Mr Sin to Mr Big (1993); Songs Without Music (2000); Law and the Visual: Representations, Technologies and Critique (2018) and Danse Macabre: Temporalities of Law in the Visual Arts (2019). His latest play, Twenty Minutes with the Devil (with Luis Gómez Romero) premiered at The Street Theatre last year.