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The Kangaroo And Emu Between Legal Worlds: Unsettling The Recognition Of Difference, Rhys Aston, Kristopher Wilson

Law Text Culture

This article examines the complex interplay between colonial legal systems and Indigenous laws, using the legal challenges faced by Arabunna Elder Kevin Buzzacott as a focal point. Buzzacott's 2004 conviction for the reclamation of a bronze Australian coat of arms, an act he deemed a fulfillment of his legal obligations under Arabunna Law, underscores the colonial legal system's refusal to acknowledge Aboriginal laws and ways of being. The authors argue that the colonial legal framework operates as a ‘nomocidal’ regime, perpetuating physical and conceptual violence against Indigenous peoples by asserting a singular legal authority that erases ontological difference. Through analysis …

Utopia As “No-Place”: Utopias, Colonialism And International Law, Ruth Houghton, Aoife O'Donoghue

Law Text Culture

Utopia, etymologically, is both the no-place (ou-topos) and the good-place (eu-topos). For Thomas More, his no-place was a ‘New Island’, an imaginary location in the “New World”. Yet, More’s no-place is inhabited. More’s utopian construction begins with the displacement of indigenous communities. From the 17th to 19th century, across much of Western utopian literature, no-places were constructed through colonial exploits. Through ideas of “discovery” alongside the displacement of indigenous communities, regulating women’s bodies (the literal putting of people in their place), the invocation of science and ideas of civilisation, colonial utopias were created. Strikingly, these narratives …

Colonial Goals Through Colonial Gaols: The Imperative Of Indigenous Self- Centred Self-Determination For Indigenous Decarceration, Lisa N. Billington

Law Text Culture

Indigenous hyperincarceration is a widely documented global phenomenon that continues to attract significant research attention. Much of this research, however, fails to accurately contextualise Indigenous imprisonment within the ongoing colonial project; instead, it frames colonisation as a historical event of only distal relevance to contemporary Indigenous incarceration levels. This article rejects this premise and scrutinises the coloniality of the modern prison. Drawing on illustrations from two case study jurisdictions, Australia and Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), this article frames the imprisonment of Indigenous people in colonial carceral systems as an ongoing violation of the right of Indigenous peoples to self-determination. Building on …

Contents & Introduction, Law Text Culture, Volume 27, Rhys Aston, Kristopher Wilson, Maria Giannacopoulos

Law Text Culture

This introduction to Law Text Culture Vol 27 is an invitation to acknowledge that the right time to dare to imagine decolonised law has always been now. Today is the time to pursue a law that is disentangled from the killing and domination of colonialism and coloniality. This special issue of Law Text Culture thus gets closer to decolonisation by looking directly (and not just abstractly) at the violence necessary to the processes of colonialism and coloniality by attending to the legal and theoretical, along with the embodied, affective, poetic, sonic and aesthetic dimensions of this relation.

‘Pathology Without Pathos’: Transvaluating Blackness And Metaphors Of Disease, Sara-Maria Sorentino

Law Text Culture

In this article, I diagnose anti-black determinants that link and delink black populations to the discourse of disease, focusing on the AIDS crisis and epidemiological genealogies of causation. Against the pathologizing of black cultural choices, the liberal-Left has disaggregated the conjunction of blackness with disease. In implying an extra-social element to race, however, such a strategy runs the risk of conceptually and politically removing race from the conditions of its emergence: the violent global abstractive forces of slavery that experimentally deployed blackness as disease, infection, virus, risk, and contaminant in the first instance. Drawing from Saidiya Hartman’s theorization of ‘fungibility’ …

Colonialist And Decolonial Metaphors, Lorenzo Veracini

Law Text Culture

This paper argues that metaphors and colonial phenomena are related. It focuses in particular on the implications of metaphor for the study of colonialism and for the struggle against it. The aim is to harness metaphor’s power for decolonial rather than colonial uses.

What Have Our Homes Become? Metaphor And Metamorphosis In The Pandemic Lockdown, Fiona Jenkins

Law Text Culture

During the lockdowns enforced to meet the COVID-19 pandemic, homes were tasked with sustaining life in a time of emergency, taking on multiple new functions and inviting reflection on modes of their inhabitation. Asking ‘what have our homes become?’, the article explores the metaphorical life of ‘home’ as the locus of a set of powerfully normalizing and normative functions as well as potentials for transformation. The article weighs the meanings to be found in the exceptional time we were ‘at home’ during lockdowns, in company with Bruno Latour’s sense of the metamorphosis lockdowns brought, Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of this as …

Terror: The Danger Of Legal Theatre, Markéta Štěpáníková

Law Text Culture

When Ferdinand von Schirach wrote Terror, a perfect example of the legal theatre was created. It is a trial or tribunal play that deals both with current legal issues and a profound legal-philosophical dilemma of sacrificing human lives for the lives of others. Moreover, this play provides a space for the audience to express their legal opinion in a very theatrical way. In a sense, this play refers to the roots of ancient Greek theatre (see eg Gaakeer 2019) and its fundamentally political meaning.

Thus, it may seem that this play is an answer to every law and theatre scholar’s …

Antigones Of Contemporary Theatre: Capturing Problems Of Today’S Civil Disobedience In A Theatre Play, Dorota Anna Gozdecka

Law Text Culture

Despite its ancient origin Sophocles’ Antigone has proven to be timeless and provided continued inspiration for legal scholars, theatre practitioners and theorists alike. In this article I reflect on how the figure of Antigone continues to inspire contemporary play writing preoccupied with the intersections of law and theatre. The article analyses the play of my authorship, ‘Trumpsformation’ using the notion of ‘contemporary Antigones’. I argue that while Antigone has been often seen as a specific type of a female character, sometimes even a disturbed one, in my understanding a variety of characters can take on a role of an Antigone. …

Staging Repair, Danish Sheikh

Law Text Culture

This paper articulates “repair work” – drawing from Eve Sedgwick’s concept of reparative reading – as a jurisprudential activity. In the late 90s, Sedgwick urged her scholarly community to invest in reparative readings as a contrast to the prevalent hermeneutics of suspicion. The reparative impulse, she wrote, “is additive and accretive …. it wants to assemble and confer plenitude on an object that will then have resources to offer to an inchoate self”. A commitment to reparative reading entails an openness to surprise, to the rendering of the self as vulnerable, to the potentially traumatic experience of hope. In this …

Would You Like To Play On The Seesaw?, Julie Lassonde

Law Text Culture

I am a performance artist and a social justice lawyer. From 2014 to 2017, I developed a performance and installation series entitled Counterbalance, which involved a seesaw. The first phase of the series occurred at a law school and the second phase at a courthouse. In this essay, I share elements of my process creating the artwork and discoveries made through this process. More precisely, I examine how the Counterbalance series revealed the potential for traditional legal institutions to open up to a wider range of performances. I start by describing each project phase. Comparing these phases, I then move …

Carceral Atmospheres On Manus Island: Listening To How Are You Today, Emma K. Russell

Law Text Culture

This paper develops a conception of ‘carceral atmospheres’ as a way of framing our encounter with the sound art and archive how are you today, created by the Manus Recording Project Collective (MRPC). This 2018 work involved the creation and collection of 84 field recordings by six asylum seekers and refugees indefinitely detained on Manus Island by the Australian government. I argue that a proper engagement with the medium and mode of production of how are you today – that is, offshore detention and transborder solidarity – requires a sensory politics that is attuned to the dynamic and …

‘Listening Intently’ To Lgbtqi Lives: Diplomatic Narratives Of Listening And Hearing In Lgbtqi Rights., Kay Lalor

Law Text Culture

This paper examines how public diplomatic practices of listening operate within unequal and often chaotic transnational spaces. In analysing transnational listening, the paper distinguishes between interpersonal and state based listening and argues that states – as polyvocal, multiscalar assemblages - listen differently to individuals. In particular, while interpersonal listening retains the possibility of openness, uncertainty and being moved unexpectedly by what is heard, state based listening is focused much more closely upon listening as a device of organisation and control.

To explore the operation of state based listening, the paper undertakes a case study of US public diplomatic promises to …

Earwitnessing The Queer Acoustics Of Public Space: Law, Sex And Nature In Ultra-Red’S Second Nature, David C. Jackson

Law Text Culture

This paper examines queer sex and public space usage in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park through a series of recordings produced by the sound collective Ultra-red. Ultra-red have been using sound as a mode of political analysis since 1994 when they were founded by two AIDS activists in Los Angeles. This paper works in particular with two records released by Ultra-red in the late 1990s: an EP Ode to Johnny Rio (1998) and album Second Nature: An Electroacoustic Pastoral (1999), which are often referred to collectively as the Second Nature. For the Second Nature project, they draw their sound material from …

Contents & Introduction, Law Text Culture, Volume 24, James Parker, Sara Ramshaw, Mehera San Roque

Law Text Culture

This essay introduces a large and diverse special issue on ‘The Acoustics of Justice: Law, Listening, Sound’. Until recently the acoustic dimensions of law and justice were not a major concern in the academy, either in self-consciously legal scholarship, or elsewhere. Things are changing, as indeed the size of this collection suggests. And our hope is that the work gathered here will go some way to addressing this deficit. Nevertheless, this introduction does not attempt to theorise how. Though the collection was conceived in 2019, it was mostly produced since the arrival of COVID-19. And we are tired. We have …

Listening Beyond The Border: Self-Representation, Witnessing, And The White Sonic Field, Andrew Brooks

Law Text Culture

This paper considers the relationship between sound and the structural violence of whiteness in the context of the Australian settler colony. It thinks with an archive of audio recordings made by the Manus Recording Project Collective, a group of men currently or formerly held in involuntary and indefinite detention after seeking asylum in Australia, and their collaborators in Melbourne. Tracking the demonisation of refugees in the media and party politics over the past two decades, I develop the notion of the white sonic field as a way of accounting for the way both sound and perception are racially saturated in …

‘Shoot The Boer’ – Hate Speech, Law And The Expediency Of Sound, Veit Erlmann

Law Text Culture

In recent years, “Shoot the Boer” (“Dubul’ ibhunu”), a well-known protest song from the apartheid era, experienced an unexpected revival in the streets of South Africa—and the courts. The article traces the history of the intersection of the song and the law as it meandered through an intricate topography of cases, rules and regulations ranging from the common-law crime of high treason, apartheid “anti-terrorism” and “anti-communism” law, post-apartheid constitutional law and the Broadcasting Code of Conduct. In contrast to established judicial practice where hate speech is reduced to its verbal dimension and sound serves as an expedient and abject to …

Singing The Law: The Musicality Of Legal Performance, Sean Mulcahy

Law Text Culture

What would the law sound like if it was sung?

Whilst scholars have explored the relation between music and law, focus on the acoustic and musical dimensions of legal speech is relatively new. Exploring musical adaptations and remixes of legal transcripts, the paper argues that there is a latent musicality to legal speech.

Using as case studies Opera Australia’s production of ‘Lindy’ and Donmar Warehouse’s production of ‘Committee’, where legal speech was adapted verbatim from legal transcripts into musical score, the paper investigates what these composers have to say about their jurisprudential source material. Through advancing this notion of latent …

Towards Acoustic Justice, Brandon Labelle

Law Text Culture

The essay poses acoustics as a critical and creative framework, one that gives entry onto the issues of cultural situatedness and social recognition. In particular, acoustics is underscored not only as a property of architectural space, or as a knowledge within the field of physics, but equally as a social and political question. In what ways do acoustic norms shape the experiences and capacities of listening and attunement within certain environments? Acoustics is highlighted as a performative arena, giving way to specific understandings of relationality and struggles over recognition. This leads to investigating how acoustics functions as the basis for …

Documents Against ‘Knowledge’; Immanence And Transcendence And Approaching Legal Materials, James Leach

Law Text Culture

In the wake of Ingold’s critique of ‘materiality’, one that highlights the cosmological assumptions about spirit and matter that the concept inscribes, I examine ‘material’ documents that record custom and indigenous knowledge on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea. Documents and books have a history there bound up with colonial governance and with missionisation, thus a strong connection with imposed ‘law’ in local understanding, yet the production and circulation of documents have also been a site of resistance to the imposition of outside forms of politics, law, and ‘knowledge’. Examining the documents they choose to make themselves makes us …

Against The Power Of Algorithms Closing, Literate Programming, And Source Code Critique, Markus Krajewski

Law Text Culture

Current commentaries on digital change have emphasised the reality of our increasing exposure to the power of algorithms. My intervention examines this assertion with a media-historical approach that traces arguments raised in a legal case to the point of software inception. I show that the power of algorithm is based on the eminent cultural techniques of reading and writing. As an antidote to this power, I propose the concept of source code critique, which draws upon historiography and so-called ‘literate programming’, and which could help to introduce transparency into an algorithm's opaque agency.

The Duelling Ethic And The Spirit Of Libel Law: Matters And Materials Of Honour In France, Matei Candea

Law Text Culture

Contemporary French libel law explicitly proposes to adjudicate matters of “honour”. In so doing, it deploys terms and techniques crafted in the 19th century, at a time when law’s jurisdiction over matters of honour was strongly disputed by an alternative quasi-legal institution: the duelling code. This article returns to that historical moment from a legal materiality perspective to examine the ways in which duelling and libel law borrowed from each other’s materials in order to make honour matter. It argues that the history of libel law cannot be cast as a straightforward instance of the legal 'formalisation' of a mere …

The Law Is Not A Thing: Kafkan (Im)Materialism And Imitation Jam, James R. Martel

Law Text Culture

In this article, I look at the question of how the law continually refounds itself in relationship to the material world by borrowing from that materiality a sense of its own tangibility (which it otherwise does not have) even as it in turn draws material orbits into its object lending them a certain sense of power and nobility (which they otherwise do not have either). This exchange suggests an unexpected vulnerability for the law insofar as it needs the material world to exist at all while the material world does not require an association with the law per se (and …

A Change Of Heart: Retraction And Body, Marie-Andrée Jacob, Anna Macdonald

Law Text Culture

Our intervention stems from a shared interest in lines as material, somatic and metaphorical forms. The line that we interrogate is the strikethrough: the line superimposed upon text in order to retract a meaningful or weighty statement in particular legal proceedings. We ask what this seemingly simple device of erasure can reveal about the transparent retraction of a statement, and its place within a dispositif attributed to law. Taking note of the editors’ explicit injunction not to necessarily equate the material with the physical, we mine the artefactual qualities of the typographical line of strikethrough: to us it constitutes a …

‘The Beauty…Is That It Speaks For Itself’: Geospatial Materials As Evidentiary Matters, Kamari Maxine Clarke, Sara Kendall

Law Text Culture

This essay takes up the incorporation of geospatial materials into international criminal law and its institutional locations, focusing on the Hague-based International Criminal Court (ICC). We consider how geospatial materials such as satellite imagery are conscripted as legal materials for international criminal trials, and how these relatively novel forms of evidence require interventions of technical knowledge through expert witness testimony. The assemblage of satellite imagery, expert testimony, and submitted reports are subjected to what we call ‘juridical mediation’ – the vetting of materials through interpretive processes that bring them into a relationship with textual forms, such as statutory principles and …

Targeted By Persuasion: Military Uniforms And The Legal Matter Of Killing In War, Mahmoud Keshavarz, Amin Parsa

Law Text Culture

In this paper, we argue that the legitimation of killing in war is not simply formed by adherence to certain legal requirements that exist apart from and prior to war; instead, we suggest, the law of armed conflict in itself cannot but operate through admitting certain materials onto the battlefield as distinctively legal materials. Using the theory of legal materiality, we show that the military uniform is a legal material that makes the legal matter of legitimate targeting intelligible to law. This process happens through the ways in which the uniform shapes the possibility of visual recognition and differentiation in …

Heretical Archives: Heterotopic Institutions And Fictive Records, Peter Goodrich

Law Text Culture

The archive is in significant part the melancholic record of death. It harbours coffins, tombs and tomes. An image, first, of an untimely death. Part of a personal archive, the record of time long since spent. Shards of a history that did not happen. A shadow. A shade. Dr Ewan Maclean, a figure of encyclopedic learning and aesthetic inclinations, did his doctorate on art forgery. I knew him, and I had admired his knowledge and his thesis while studying in Edinburgh. He was short, bald, bibliophilic, brilliant but boring and in consequence unmemorable and prone to alcohol and an academic …

How Strange The Change From Major To Minor, Peter Goodrich

Law Text Culture

The lines from a Noel Coward song provide the appropriately melancholic and suitably ambiguous title to an excavation of the ontology of the minor. Associated theologically with the abrogation of all law, the minor is the child, play, the modal chord that challenges, subverts and displaces the certainty of the major key and black letter law. A minor jurisprudence is argued here to be a lifestyle that challenges the extant legal form of office, the establishment as doctrine, the stasis and complacency of the institution.

A Minor Jurisprudence Of Spectacular War: Law As Eye In The Sky, Jothie Rajah

Law Text Culture

The 2016 film, Eye in the Sky (Eye), features contestation among lawyers, politicians, and military personnel as to law’s values, meanings, and consequences. In other words, Eye is animated by jurisprudence. As jurisprudence, Eye represents contemporary drone warfare as a highly regulated legal system structured around an ethical valuing of civilian life. Given that drone warfare is known yet secret, by rendering drone warfare vivid and visible, what legal system does Eye construct, which jurisprudential questions are asked, and which are occluded? Drawing on scholarship relating to minor jurisprudence, and spectacular war, this essay argues that Eye dazzles us with …

Law As Minor Jurisprudence: Is It A Mistake?, Genevieve Renard Painter

Law Text Culture

What is law as minor jurisprudence? Existing scholarship around the concept of minor jurisprudence associates it with processes that start something, found something, or stand outside something and, further, with processes that conceal or erase. To seek to clarify the meaning and effect of the phrase ‘“law as” … minor jurisprudence’, I consider cases of mistake that, as legal speech acts, transform a state of affairs. In Part I, I use JL Austin’s theory about speech acts to analyse how speech can be mistaken and how such mistakes may transform states of affairs, using cases of encounters between Indigenous, settler, …