Law,Culture and the Humanities

Courts make use of a range of images as proof objects. This paper highlights the doctrinal assumptions that the image is a clear and perspicacious representation of a (probable) truth and that the ideal image would be the result of an acheiropoietic process. In contrast to judicially defined doctrine, evidential practices of looking at images tend to surrender to a clutter of detail and impurities. Images are rather examined and scrutinized with meticulous precision. The works of Ravit Reichman, Carlo Ginzburg, and Jacques Derrida have already done much to radicalize and re-house the concept of the detail. The argument here will be that an understanding of “detailism” as it reveals itself in the evidential practice of looking at images might help provide an alternative understanding of how the trial operates.

Prior to recent U.S.-based work about the performance rituals of state killing and “the NEA 4,” Theatre and Performance research demonstrates extensive negotiations with and about “law as a preservative of terror” that in 1966 Theodor Adorno calls “the primal phenomenon of irrational rationality.” Currently, the field shows active interest in three inter-related arenas invoking the practices of “the law's” authorizations. The first involves performances of everyday events, and the complex social spaces in which people test the limits of “the legal subject” in relation to the norms of, for example, national, cultural, and global citizenship. If cultural events, practices, and artifacts of the world provide crucial research materials in theatre and performance projects, the deployment of methodologies in archival documentation collating “the world” and “the past” with the everyday also reach into the rhetorics of evidence. Hence the second, correlating, area of contemporary theatre and performance research concerned with law and the state has to do with “archive fever:” creative methodologies deploying, broadly speaking, the evidences of archival and documentary research. Finally, the third arena takes up questions of the arts, human rights, and cultural policy, with particular focus on the current era of neoliberal governmentality.

“Performance” and “performativity” have become central terms in the discussion of legal identity over the past decade or two, and “performance” and “theatricality” figure in a number of theoretical writings on law. This essay reviews these discussions, looking at the ways in which they construe legal performance and assessing what they have to say about its nature, meaning, and consequences for the law. Diagnosing a split in the critical literature between a vision of legal theatricality endemically complicit with the law's authoritarian control of the subject and a vision of it as an agent of liberation from authoritarian subjugation, I identity this split with a longer history of ambivalence about the theatricality of the law. On the one hand, this essay is simply a map of what has been said in the past few decades about legal performance. On the other, it serves as a critical introduction to a longer-term study of the role of legal performance (as both instrument and concept) in the historical production and reception of the law.

This paper tracks how difficult material conditions are lived on the level of affect among ordinary underemployed families engaged in the locally named practice “the art of making do” in the contact zone where the informal and illicit economies meet. This zone is where tens of thousands of ordinary underemployed Neapolitans and the camorra, Naples' powerful and diffuse organized crime networks participate in a shared, albeit volatile, affective community. Affect is a pre-personal experience of intensity, the ability to affect or be affected. Affective community in Naples is less an identity or organization than it is a synergy, event or practice. It is experienced as a blend of fear, recognition and tolerance through the phenomena of contact, complicity and conspiracy.

This article analyzes the legal discourse of native Hawaiians opposed to proposed federal recognition. We argue that this contemporary contest over the means of self-determination reveals the ways in which law and rights provide inescapable idioms for indigenous sovereignty at the same time that they form the primary obstacles that must be overcome. Strategic maneuvering through this postcolonial legal dilemma is shown to produce new ideas of law's authority, challenging dominant notions of place and time, as well as the performance of legal recognition.

The contempoprary experience of terrorism asks considerable questions of classical conceptions of law and legal theory in the field of political violence. These questions are rooted in problems of definition, and they are not reserved to the discipline of law. It has been argued that terrorism is an innately mythic construct, and that the world in which the terrorist, and counter-terrorist, operates, is one of collective enchantment. This article is premised upon this supposition. It argues that a `poethical' approach, one that embraces the particular disciplinary insights of language and literature, presents a vital supplement to present jurisprudential endeavors to comprehend terrorism. The first part of the article argues the case for a poethics of terror. The second and third then discuss the particular treatment of terrorism in the novels of Joseph Conrad, Feodor Dostoevsky and J.M. Coetzee. The final part of the article reiterates the particular strategic value of a poethical approach in our endeavor to access an ethical, as well as political and cultural, understanding of modern terrorism.

August Wilson's The Piano Lesson features a debate between an African American brother and sister over the ownership of a richly symbolic piano, a family heirloom that represents the Charles family's slave heritage and its endurance through Reconstruction. Ownership questions like the one presented in The Piano Lesson can usually be resolved in the courts, but Wilson's play suggests that the law might be unable to resolve property disputes so problematically entangled with the legacy of slavery. Wilson offers, instead, a non-legal resolution to the piano debate presented in his play.