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
1 - Theories of Decolonisation; or, to Break All the Tables and Create the World Necessary for Us All to Survive
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
The essential thing here is to see clearly, to think clearly – that is, dangerously – and to answer clearly the innocent first question: what, fundamentally, is colonization?
Aimé Césaire (2001: 32)Another world is … necessary, for this one is unjust, unsustainable, and unsafe. It’s up to us to envision, fight for, and create that world, a world of freedom, real justice, balance, and shared abundance, a world woven in a new design.
Starhawk (2008: 8)Introduction
As Césaire notes, any engagement with theories of decolonisation requires an appreciation of the spatial–temporal contexts in which the colonisation/decolonisation co-constitutive relationship has evolved. In addition to this, Starhawk points us towards a desirable direction for decolonisation. Therefore, it must be understood, that without a longitudinal and planetary study of different context-based evolutions of decolonisation’s theories, action that purports to engage with it will be superficial, unable to grasp the contingencies, exigencies, purposes, and limitations of their analyses. Therefore, this chapter focuses on a detailed examination of the colonisation/decolonisation interrelation, especially theorisations that conceptualise the normativity of the colonial in constructing theoretical and practical opposition to it. This examination proceeds through the different contexts in which this colonisation/decolonisation relationship manifests itself: settler states, post-colonial states, as well as within colonising states, such as the UK. Special attention is paid to the spatial–temporal continuities and overlaps within these structures and their refusals … noting that the long survival of the logics and praxes of ongoing colonialism is due, in part, to its ability to co-opt the other, adapt itself, and evolve when necessary. Therefore, context-based refusals have always also had to adapt and evolve, especially to the contexts in which they find themselves and the tools to which they have access. Thus, Baldwin noting these continuities in structure and refusal, invites us to imagine and accept that the civil rights movement in the US was just another in a long line of slave rebellions (1979). In the same vein, prison and police abolitionists narrate the end of formalised racialised slavery, not as a break, but a point of continuing evolution of new forms of racialised capitalist exploitation (Leroy 2021: 8).
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- Information
- Decolonisation and Legal KnowledgeReflections on Power and Possibility, pp. 14 - 37Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2023