Abstract
What is at stake in the genres in which we tell the story of our times?
David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Duke University Press, 2004).
In Conscripts of Modernity, David Scott highlights seven new paragraphs added to the second, revised edition of C. L. R. James’s classic, The Black Jacobins, in which the story of Haitian revolutionary leader Touissant Louverture gets rewritten, twenty-five years later, as a tragedy rather than as an epic romance. Scott vindicates the shift toward the tragic as a strategic move away from the Romantic narrative of anticolonial resistance and toward an alternative horizon and criticism of the present.
Linsey Stonebridge, Judicial Imagination: Writing After Nuremberg (Edinburgh University Press, 2011).
Lindsey Stonebridge inquires about the narrative forms suitable to judge the enormity of the Nazis’ crimes, crimes which exceeded law’s imagination. Stonebridge engages with a group of female writers who sought to forge new literary idioms in the postwar era; Hannah Arendt in particular emerges as a key thinker who identified the problem of judgment in law’s inability to find a fitting language. Stonebridge reads Arendt’s oft-criticized irony as a form of oblique, doubled-voiced speech that “defrosts” thought and enables her, beyond criticizing law, to stage its very impasses and inadequacies from within.
Margaret Davies, Law Unlimited: Materialism, Pluralism, and Legal Theory (Routledge, 2018).
In Law Unlimited, Margaret Davies poses the problem of contemporary legal theory: if the reified and universal concept of law obsessively pursued by jurisprudence “does not exist” (157), what is to replace it? Davies draws from recent trends in legal geography, new materialism, indigenous law, critical race and feminist theory, and critical pluralism to reimagine law as polyphonic, enacted, located, relational, and material. Writing in the midst of epochal transformations, Davies’s theorizing is prefigurative and performative. Theory must envision and respond to a future with which conventional jurisprudence has yet to catch up.
James Boyd White, Keep Law Alive (Carolina Academic Press, 2018).
Keep Law Alive marks yet another epochal shift in which law is under deliberate attack and risks being hollowed out. Written in the double-voice of a critic who exposes these threats and a conversation partner who appeals to “you,” the book seeks to intervene in the present by preserving the memory of how law could be talked about “even in a different world” (160). As a compositional activity built upon structural tensions, it is for each of us to realize what about law is worth keeping alive and what would be lost if forces opposed to law were to prevail.
Desmond Manderson, Danse Macabre: Temporalities of Law in the Visual Arts (Cambridge University Press, 2019).
Danse Macabre invites the reader to dance with time. Classics like Bruegel, Reynolds, Turner, and Klimt come to life, not as inert or frozen, but as continuously in motion, showing surprising connections with the anticolonial art of Gordon Bennet and the ghostly crimes of Mexican muralist Rafael Cauduro. In a book that demands slow reading, Manderson invites “fabulous” or anachronistic associations that transform our sense of the real and lead to better practices of judgment both in law and art. Opposing aestheticization, his virtuoso performance is eye-opening, politically engaged, and timely.