Are postcolonies haunted more by criminal violence than other nation-states? The usual answer is yes. In Law and Disorder in the Postcolony, Jean and John Comaroff and a group of respected theorists show that the question is misplaced: that the predicament of postcolonies arises from their place in a world order dominated by new modes of governance, new sorts of empires, new species of wealth—an order that criminalizes poverty and race, entraps the “south” in relations of corruption, and displaces politics into the realms of the market, criminal economies, and the courts. 

As these essays make plain, however, there is another side to postcoloniality: while postcolonies live in states of endemic disorder, many of them fetishize the law, its ways and itsmeans. How is the coincidence of disorder with a fixation on legalities to be explained? Law and Disorder in the Postcolony addresses this question, entering into critical dialogue with such theorists as Benjamin, Agamben, and Bayart. In the process, it also demonstrates how postcolonies have become crucial sites for the production of contemporary theory, not least because they are harbingers of a global future under construction.

Although postcolonialism is now the main mode in which the West's relation to the "other" is critically explored, and although law has been at the forefront of that very relation, a thorough engagement between law and postcolonialism has not been pursued, in part because this would drastically disrupt not just the persistent orthodoxy of law and development but also the newly settled consensus around legal globalization and international human rights discourse. These essays break new ground in using the ideas of postcolonialism in a critical analysis of the current consensus on the international influence of Western law and on Western ideas of law in general.
In perceptions of Western law there is an enduring disparity between law's pervasive power and its fragility. Many of these essays provide graphic accounts of law's tremendous shaping power in that massive occidental movement which settled and unsettled the globe. These accounts point to the West's encompassing and transforming of other peoples and other legal systems in ways which constitute and confirm the West in its own self-creation. Other essays deal with situations "within" the West which show how its identity is created, sustained, and also challenged in a constant reference to those contrary "others" which a powerful law has shaped and transformed. This challenge comes not least from the resistance of those "others" --resistances that profoundly disrupt the West and its law, revealing them as fractured at the seemingly confident core of their own self-constitution.
Contributors include Antony Anghie, Rolando Gaete, Alan Norrie, Dianne Otto, Paul Passavant, Jeannine Perdy, Colin Perrin, Annelise Riles, Roshan de Silva, and John Strawson, in addition to the editors.
Eve Darian-Smith is Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Barbara. Peter Fitzpatrick is Professor of Law, Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London.

 

Addressing areas as diverse as the philosophy of higher education, gender, citizenship, human rights, and indigenous agency, and providing fascinating and little-known examples of decolonial thinking, education, and art, Madina V. Tlostanova and Walter D. Mignolo deconstruct the modern architecture of knowledge—its production and distribution as manifested in the corporate university. In addition, the authors dwell on and define the echoing global decolonial sensibilities as expressed in the Americas and in peripheral Eurasia.

 

The book is an important addition to the emerging transoceanic inquiries that introduce decolonial thought and non-Western border epistemologies not only to update or transform disciplines but also to act and think decolonially in the global futures to come.

Shahrazad, the legendary fictional storyteller who spun the tales of the 1,001 Arabian Nights, has long been rendered as a silent exotic beauty by Western film and fiction adaptations. Now, she talks back to present a new image of Muslim women.

In Liberating Shahrazad, Suzanne Gauch analyzes how postcolonial writers and filmmakers from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia have reclaimed the storyteller in order to portray Muslim women in ways that highlight their power to shape their own destinies. Gauch looks at Maghrebian works that incorporate Shahrazad’s storytelling techniques into unexpected and unforeseen narratives. Highlighting the fluid nature of storytelling, Gauch demonstrates how these new depictions of Shahrazad—from artists such as Moufida Tlatli, Fatima Mernissi, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Assia Djebar, Leïla Sebbar—navigate the demands of a global marketplace, even as they reshape the stories told about the Islamic world.

In the face of both rising fundamentalism and proliferating Western media representations of Arab and Muslim women as silent, exploited, and uneducated victims, Gauch establishes how contemporary works of literature and film revive the voice of a long-silenced Shahrazad—and, ultimately, overthrow oppressive images of Muslim women. Suzanne Gauch is assistant professor of English and women’s studies at Temple University.

Lusophone Africa: Beyond Independence is a study of the contemporary cultural production of Portuguese-speaking Africa and its critical engagement with globalization in the aftermath of colonialism, especially since the advent of multiparty politics and market-oriented economies.

Exploring the evolving relationship of Lusophone Africa with Portugal, its former colonial power, and Brazil, Fernando Arenas situates the countries on the geopolitical map of contemporary global forces. Drawing from popular music, film, literature, cultural history, geopolitics, and critical theory to investigate the postcolonial condition of Portuguese-speaking Africa, Arenas offers an entirely original discussion of world music phenomenon Cesária Évora, as well as the most thorough examination to date of Lusophone African cinema and of Angolan post-civil-war fiction.

Throughout, Arenas evokes the rich multidimensionality of this community of African nations as a whole and of its individual parts: Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe since they gained their independence in the mid-1970s. In doing so, he puts forth a conceptual framework for understanding, for the first time, recent cultural and historical developments in Portuguese-speaking Africa.