Details

Subject(s)

• Aboriginal Australians—Legal status, laws, etc—Social aspects [Browse]
• Chagossians—Legal status, laws, etc—Social aspects [Browse]
• Post-apartheid era—South Africa [Browse]
• Refugees—Legal status, laws, etc—Social aspects—Australia [Browse]
• Sociological jurisprudence [Browse]
• Sovereignty—Social aspects [Browse]
• Transitional justice—Social aspects—South Africa [Browse]
• British Indian Ocean Territory—International status—Social aspects [Browse]

Issuing body

• Michigan Publishing (University of Michigan) [Browse]

Publisher

• Michigan Publishing (University of Michigan) [Browse]

Series

Law, meaning, and violence [More in this series]

Summary note

Archiving Sovereignty shows how courts use fiction in their treatment of sovereign violence. Law's complicity with imperial and neocolonial practices occurs when courts inscribe and repeat the fabulous tales that provide an alibi for archaic sovereign acts that persist in the present. The United Kingdom's depopulation of islands in the Indian Ocean to serve the United States' neoimperial interests, Australia's exile and abandonment of refugees on remote islands, the failure to acknowledge genocidal acts or colonial dispossession, and the memorial work of the South African Constitution after apartheid are all sustained by historical fictions. This history-work of law constitutes an archive where sovereign violence is mediated, dissimulated, and sustained. Stewart Motha extends the concept of the "archive," as site of origin and source of authority, to signifying what law does in preserving and disavowing the past at the same time. Sovereignty is often cast as a limit-concept, constituent force, determining the boundary of law. Archiving Sovereignty reverses this to explain how judicial pronouncements inscribe and sustain extravagant claims to exceptionality and sovereign solitude. This wide-ranging, critical work distinguishes between myths that sustain neocolonial orders and fictions that generate new forms of political and ethical life.

Bibliographic references

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Source of description

Description based on information from publisher.

Contents

• Solitude
• Bodies
• Facts
• Belongers.

Show 1 more Contents items

ISBN

9780472123988 (electronic book)

Doi

• 10.3998/mpub.7218743

Statement on language in description

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