Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Introduction: Setting the Scene of the Law School and the Discipline
- 1 Theories of Decolonisation; or, to Break All the Tables and Create the World Necessary for Us All to Survive
- 2 What Have You Done, Where Have You Been, Euro-Modern Legal Academe? Uncovering the Bones of Law’s Colonial Ontology
- 3 Defining the Law’s Subject I: (Un)Making the Wretched of the Earth
- 4 Defining the Law’s Subject II: Law and Creating the Sacrifice Zones of Colonialism
- 5 Defining the Law’s Subject III: Law, Time, and Colonialism’s Slow Violence
- 6 The Law School: Colonial Ground Zero – a Colonial Convergence in the Human and Space–Time
- Conclusion: Another University Is Necessary to Take Us towards Pluriversal Worlds
- References
- Cases Cited
- Index
5 - Defining the Law’s Subject III: Law, Time, and Colonialism’s Slow Violence
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 January 2024
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Introduction: Setting the Scene of the Law School and the Discipline
- 1 Theories of Decolonisation; or, to Break All the Tables and Create the World Necessary for Us All to Survive
- 2 What Have You Done, Where Have You Been, Euro-Modern Legal Academe? Uncovering the Bones of Law’s Colonial Ontology
- 3 Defining the Law’s Subject I: (Un)Making the Wretched of the Earth
- 4 Defining the Law’s Subject II: Law and Creating the Sacrifice Zones of Colonialism
- 5 Defining the Law’s Subject III: Law, Time, and Colonialism’s Slow Violence
- 6 The Law School: Colonial Ground Zero – a Colonial Convergence in the Human and Space–Time
- Conclusion: Another University Is Necessary to Take Us towards Pluriversal Worlds
- References
- Cases Cited
- Index
Summary
Colonialism is not simply content to impose its rule upon the present and the future of a dominated country. … By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts it, disfigures and destroys it.
Frantz Fanon (2007: 149)The colonialists usually say that it was they who brought us into history: today we show that this is not so. They made us leave history, our history, to follow them, right at the back, to follow the progress of their history.
Amilcar Cabral (1969: 63)The defining feature of being drafted into the black race was the inescapable robbery of time, because the moments we spent readying the mask, or readying ourselves to accept half as much, could not be recovered. The robbery of time is not measured in lifespans but in moments.
Ta-Nehisi Coates (2015: 91)Introduction
Fanon, Cabral, and Coates illustrate how the reproduction of the colonial ever-present is undergirded by colonialism’s manoeuvring in time. Thus, time and temporality are essential to understanding the interplay between legal knowledge and colonialism and how colonial logics are carried into the future. Temporality (materially constructed by memory practices, but also with non-human agents) denotes a subjective movement through moments, while time (socially constructed and cognitive) represents the objective attempt to quantify, measure, and mark that movement (see generally Bluedorn 2002: 14; Hoy 2012: 92; Birth 2012: 102; Grabham 2016: 16, 34–5; Abazi and Doja 2018: 240). In other words, temporality can be described as ‘the experience and perception of time’ (Lundström and Sartoretto 2021: 2). Times and temporalities, therefore, connect the earth and all its inhabitants – human, non-human, and inanimate – across space–time (Grabham 2016: 30). The introduction of the clock as a record of time is intimately linked with the acceleration of modes of accumulation and dispossession, which intensified during the colonial–enslavement project and increasingly thereafter under the auspices of globalised accretion of capital. Euro-modern legal knowledge, especially within the common law, is heavily reliant on time and temporality to make its meanings.
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- Decolonisation and Legal KnowledgeReflections on Power and Possibility, pp. 108 - 127Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2023