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
6 - The Law School: Colonial Ground Zero – a Colonial Convergence in the Human and Space–Time
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
What becomes possible when blackness wonders and wanders in the world, heeding the ethical mandate to challenge our thinking, to release the imagination, and to welcome the end of the world as we know it, that is, decolonization, which is the only proper name for justice.
Denise Ferreira da Silva (2018: 22)Introduction
This chapter starts with the premise taken up in the previous chapters – that decolonisation is a specific anti-colonial political project of justice (as per da Silva), instituted by colonised peoples, including, peoples in what is designated the Global South, racialised peoples, and indigenous peoples. So, decolonisation is the stubborn and enduring refusal of conditions of life imposed by the logics and praxes of colonial domination, through, inter alia, Euro-modern legal concepts and meanings of the human and space–time. Therefore, as legal academics attempting to think of legal knowledge through the prisms of decolonisation and anticolonialism, we need to understand what it means, theoretically and practically, to use the phrases ‘decolonise the law curriculum/law school’. Here, I must reiterate the point that decolonisation begins as and remains a political project. The phrase ‘decolonise the law curriculum’ and its (mis)use in that sense are somewhat and increasingly mismatched. This is especially so when we detach our work in Global North higher education from the political history and present of ongoing refusal of the capitalist-colonial-enslavement ever-present. Detached from its radical roots, to claim that we are ‘decolonising the law curriculum’ becomes akin to suggesting that we are ‘measuring the yellow’ or ‘climbing the fragrance’.
To avoid misuse of radical language we must consider the ways in which learning, teaching, research, practice, and other related activity, in law can adopt a position of refusal of colonial logics and praxes. This includes understanding, as Chapter 2 explored, how much colonial code is embedded and reproduced in legal knowledge. So, I suggest that care be taken with the phrase ‘decolonising the curriculum,’ as it may not be the right phraseology to describe what the marriage of these spheres of knowledge entails within higher education in the Global North, lest we dilute the political nature of the longstanding project of decolonisation.
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- Decolonisation and Legal KnowledgeReflections on Power and Possibility, pp. 128 - 147Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2023