| Archiving Sovereignty: Law, History, Violence Contributor(s): Motha, Stewart (Author) |
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ISBN: 0472073869 ISBN-13: 9780472073863 Publisher: University of Michigan Press OUR PRICE: $79.15 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: October 2018 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Social Science | Indigenous Studies - Social Science | Black Studies (global) - Law | Indigenous Peoples |
| Dewey: 340.115 |
| LCCN: 2017055316 |
| Series: Law, Meaning, and Violence |
| Physical Information: 0.8" H x 6.2" W x 9.1" (1.00 lbs) 208 pages |
| Themes: - Cultural Region - Southern Africa - Cultural Region - Australian |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: 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. |