Global and Insurgent Legalities – Serie

In 1914 the British-built and Japanese-owned steamship Komagata Maru left Hong Kong for Vancouver carrying 376 Punjabi migrants. Chartered by railway contractor and purported rubber planter Gurdit Singh, the ship and its passengers were denied entry into Canada and two months later were deported to Calcutta. In Across Oceans of Law Renisa Mawani retells this well-known story of the Komagata Maru. Drawing on "oceans as method"-a mode of thinking and writing that repositions land and sea-Mawani examines the historical and conceptual stakes of situating histories of Indian migration within maritime worlds. Through close readings of the ship, the manifest, the trial, and the anticolonial writings of Singh and others, Mawani argues that the Komagata Maru's landing raised urgent questions regarding the jurisdictional tensions between the common law and admiralty law, and, ultimately, the legal status of the sea. By following the movements of a single ship and bringing oceans into sharper view, Mawani traces British imperial power through racial, temporal, and legal contests and offers a novel method of writing colonial legal history.

In 1914 the British-built and Japanese-owned steamship Komagata Maru left Hong Kong for Vancouver carrying 376 Punjabi migrants. Chartered by railway contractor and purported rubber planter Gurdit Singh, the ship and its passengers were denied entry into Canada and two months later were deported to Calcutta. In Across Oceans of Law Renisa Mawani retells this well-known story of the Komagata Maru. Drawing on "oceans as method"-a mode of thinking and writing that repositions land and sea-Mawani examines the historical and conceptual stakes of situating histories of Indian migration within maritime worlds. Through close readings of the ship, the manifest, the trial, and the anticolonial writings of Singh and others, Mawani argues that the Komagata Maru's landing raised urgent questions regarding the jurisdictional tensions between the common law and admiralty law, and, ultimately, the legal status of the sea. By following the movements of a single ship and bringing oceans into sharper view, Mawani traces British imperial power through racial, temporal, and legal contests and offers a novel method of writing colonial legal history.

In Colonial Lives of Property Brenna Bhandar examines how modern property law contributes to the formation of racial subjects in settler colonies and to the development of racial capitalism. Examining both historical cases and ongoing processes of settler colonialism in Canada, Australia, and Israel and Palestine, Bhandar shows how the colonial appropriation of indigenous lands depends upon ideologies of European racial superiority as well as upon legal narratives that equate civilized life with English concepts of property. In this way, property law legitimates and rationalizes settler colonial practices while it racializes those deemed unfit to own property. The solution to these enduring racial and economic inequities, Bhandar demonstrates, requires developing a new political imaginary of property in which freedom is connected to shared practices of use and community rather than individual possession.

In Colonial Lives of Property Brenna Bhandar examines how modern property law contributes to the formation of racial subjects in settler colonies and to the development of racial capitalism. Examining both historical cases and ongoing processes of settler colonialism in Canada, Australia, and Israel and Palestine, Bhandar shows how the colonial appropriation of indigenous lands depends upon ideologies of European racial superiority as well as upon legal narratives that equate civilized life with English concepts of property. In this way, property law legitimates and rationalizes settler colonial practices while it racializes those deemed unfit to own property. The solution to these enduring racial and economic inequities, Bhandar demonstrates, requires developing a new political imaginary of property in which freedom is connected to shared practices of use and community rather than individual possession.

A transformative progressive politics requires the state's reimagining. But how should the state be reimagined, and what can invigorate this process? In Feeling Like a State, Davina Cooper explores the unexpected contribution a legal drama of withdrawal might make to conceptualizing a more socially just, participative state. In recent years, as gay rights have expanded, some conservative Christians-from charities to guesthouse owners and county clerks-have denied people inclusion, goods, and services because of their sexuality. In turn, liberal public bodies have withdrawn contracts, subsidies, and career progression from withholding conservative Christians. Cooper takes up the discourses and practices expressed in this legal conflict to animate and support an account of the state as heterogeneous, plural, and erotic. Arguing for the urgent need to put new imaginative forms into practice, Cooper examines how dissident and experimental institutional thinking materialize as people assert a democratic readiness to recraft the state.

A transformative progressive politics requires the state's reimagining. But how should the state be reimagined, and what can invigorate this process? In Feeling Like a State, Davina Cooper explores the unexpected contribution a legal drama of withdrawal might make to conceptualizing a more socially just, participative state. In recent years, as gay rights have expanded, some conservative Christians-from charities to guesthouse owners and county clerks-have denied people inclusion, goods, and services because of their sexuality. In turn, liberal public bodies have withdrawn contracts, subsidies, and career progression from withholding conservative Christians. Cooper takes up the discourses and practices expressed in this legal conflict to animate and support an account of the state as heterogeneous, plural, and erotic. Arguing for the urgent need to put new imaginative forms into practice, Cooper examines how dissident and experimental institutional thinking materialize as people assert a democratic readiness to recraft the state.

Between 1944 and 1949 the United States Navy held a war crimes tribunal that tried Japanese nationals and members of Guam's indigenous Chamorro population who had worked for Japan's military government. In Sacred Men Keith L. Camacho traces the tribunal's legacy and its role in shaping contemporary domestic and international laws regarding combatants, jurisdiction, and property. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben's notions of bare life and Chamorro concepts of retribution, Camacho demonstrates how the U.S. tribunal used and justified the imprisonment, torture, murder, and exiling of accused Japanese and Chamorro war criminals in order to institute a new American political order. This U.S. disciplinary logic in Guam, Camacho argues, continues to directly inform the ideology used to justify the GuantÁnamo Bay detention center, the torture and enhanced interrogation of enemy combatants, and the American carceral state.

Between 1944 and 1949 the United States Navy held a war crimes tribunal that tried Japanese nationals and members of Guam's indigenous Chamorro population who had worked for Japan's military government. In Sacred Men Keith L. Camacho traces the tribunal's legacy and its role in shaping contemporary domestic and international laws regarding combatants, jurisdiction, and property. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben's notions of bare life and Chamorro concepts of retribution, Camacho demonstrates how the U.S. tribunal used and justified the imprisonment, torture, murder, and exiling of accused Japanese and Chamorro war criminals in order to institute a new American political order. This U.S. disciplinary logic in Guam, Camacho argues, continues to directly inform the ideology used to justify the GuantÁnamo Bay detention center, the torture and enhanced interrogation of enemy combatants, and the American carceral state.

In Policing Protest Paul A. Passavant explores how the policing of protest in the United States has become increasingly hostile since the late 1990s, moving away from strategies that protect protesters toward militaristic practices designed to suppress protests. He identifies reactions to three interrelated crises that converged to institutionalize this new mode of policing: the political mobilization of marginalized social groups in the Civil Rights era that led to a perceived crisis of democracy, the urban fiscal crisis of the 1970s, and a crime crisis that was associated with protests and civil disobedience of the 1960s. As Passavant demonstrates, these reactions are all haunted by the figure of black insurrection, which continues to shape policing of protest and surveillance, notably in response to the Black Lives Matter movement. Ultimately, Passavant argues, this trend of violent policing strategies against protesters is evidence of the emergence of a post-democratic state in the United States.

In Policing Protest Paul A. Passavant explores how the policing of protest in the United States has become increasingly hostile since the late 1990s, moving away from strategies that protect protesters toward militaristic practices designed to suppress protests. He identifies reactions to three interrelated crises that converged to institutionalize this new mode of policing: the political mobilization of marginalized social groups in the Civil Rights era that led to a perceived crisis of democracy, the urban fiscal crisis of the 1970s, and a crime crisis that was associated with protests and civil disobedience of the 1960s. As Passavant demonstrates, these reactions are all haunted by the figure of black insurrection, which continues to shape policing of protest and surveillance, notably in response to the Black Lives Matter movement. Ultimately, Passavant argues, this trend of violent policing strategies against protesters is evidence of the emergence of a post-democratic state in the United States.

In Law by Night Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller asks what we can learn about modern law and its authority by understanding how it operates in the dark of night. He outlines how the social experience and cultural meanings of night promote racialized and gender violence, but also make possible freedom of movement for marginalized groups that might be otherwise unavailable during the day. Examining nighttime racial violence, curfews, gun ownership, the right to sleep, and “take back the night” rallies, Goldberg-Hiller demonstrates that liberal legal doctrine lacks a theory of the night that accounts for a nocturnal politics that has historically allowed violence to persist. By locating the law’s nocturnal limits, Goldberg-Hiller enriches understandings of how the law reinforces hierarchies of race and gender and foregrounds the night’s potential to enliven a more egalitarian social life.

In Struggles for the Human, Lara Montesinos Coleman blends ethnography, political philosophy, and critical theory to reorient debates on human rights through attention to understandings of legality, ethics, and humanity in anticapitalist and decolonial struggle. Drawing on her extensive involvement with grassroots social movements in Colombia, Coleman observes that mainstream expressions of human rights have become counterparts to capitalist violence, even as this discourse disavows capitalism’s deadly implications. She rejects claims that human rights are inherently tied to capitalism, liberalism, or colonialism, instead showing how human rights can be used to combat these forces. Coleman demonstrates that social justice struggles that are rooted in marginalized communities’ lived experiences can reframe human rights in order to challenge oppressive power structures and offer a blueprint for constructing alternative political economies. By examining the practice of redefining human rights away from abstract universals and contextualizing them within concrete struggles for justice, Coleman reveals the transformative potential of human rights and invites readers to question and reshape dominant legal and ethical narratives.

In Law by Night Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller asks what we can learn about modern law and its authority by understanding how it operates in the dark of night. He outlines how the social experience and cultural meanings of night promote racialized and gender violence, but also make possible freedom of movement for marginalized groups that might be otherwise unavailable during the day. Examining nighttime racial violence, curfews, gun ownership, the right to sleep, and “take back the night” rallies, Goldberg-Hiller demonstrates that liberal legal doctrine lacks a theory of the night that accounts for a nocturnal politics that has historically allowed violence to persist. By locating the law’s nocturnal limits, Goldberg-Hiller enriches understandings of how the law reinforces hierarchies of race and gender and foregrounds the night’s potential to enliven a more egalitarian social life.

In Struggles for the Human, Lara Montesinos Coleman blends ethnography, political philosophy, and critical theory to reorient debates on human rights through attention to understandings of legality, ethics, and humanity in anticapitalist and decolonial struggle. Drawing on her extensive involvement with grassroots social movements in Colombia, Coleman observes that mainstream expressions of human rights have become counterparts to capitalist violence, even as this discourse disavows capitalism’s deadly implications. She rejects claims that human rights are inherently tied to capitalism, liberalism, or colonialism, instead showing how human rights can be used to combat these forces. Coleman demonstrates that social justice struggles that are rooted in marginalized communities’ lived experiences can reframe human rights in order to challenge oppressive power structures and offer a blueprint for constructing alternative political economies. By examining the practice of redefining human rights away from abstract universals and contextualizing them within concrete struggles for justice, Coleman reveals the transformative potential of human rights and invites readers to question and reshape dominant legal and ethical narratives.

While migrants face many dangers in attempting to reach Europe by crossing the Mediterranean Sea—from drowning to dying of dehydration—they also confront an elaborate legal system that is designed to return them to their countries of origin. In The Borders of Responsibility, Kiri Olivia Santer outlines the architecture of these legal systems and how they help Europe evade legal responsibility for rescuing migrants. Focusing on legal agreements between Italy and Libya that have resulted in the systematic interception of migrants, Santer shows how Europe’s liberal identity is belied by legal agreements that let migrants die at sea or that send them back to dangerous, exploitative situations in post-Gaddafi Libya or their home countries. Law, she argues, is the tool that enables states to affect control beyond territory, whilst disappearing their responsibility for violence across border assemblages. Through ethnographic fieldwork with migrants, lawyers, policy makers, and humanitarian workers, Santer shows how the law is too often used as an instrument of violence against migrants, who fall outside of conventional structures of legal rights.

In Myanmar’s Kalay Valley, a rice-growing region near the Indian border, farmers have long been subject to violence and neglect. Surviving the State considers how these farmers’ everyday, land-based practices enable them to endure successive authoritarian regimes. Through robust ethnography, Hilary Oliva Faxon describes how Burman and Chin smallholders treat land not only as a source of food, but also as a living thing entwined with the families it supports. She considers the centrality of land both to state efforts at control and to inhabitants’ ability to articulate claims, looking at how locals evade, obfuscate, and reinvent legal boundaries in the face of seizures, redistribution, and revolution. Providing a feminist ethnography of land politics, Surviving the State is a testament to the daily work of survival in the face of political violence.

While migrants face many dangers in attempting to reach Europe by crossing the Mediterranean Sea—from drowning to dying of dehydration—they also confront an elaborate legal system that is designed to return them to their countries of origin. In The Borders of Responsibility, Kiri Olivia Santer outlines the architecture of these legal systems and how they help Europe evade legal responsibility for rescuing migrants. Focusing on legal agreements between Italy and Libya that have resulted in the systematic interception of migrants, Santer shows how Europe’s liberal identity is belied by legal agreements that let migrants die at sea or that send them back to dangerous, exploitative situations in post-Gaddafi Libya or their home countries. Law, she argues, is the tool that enables states to affect control beyond territory, whilst disappearing their responsibility for violence across border assemblages. Through ethnographic fieldwork with migrants, lawyers, policy makers, and humanitarian workers, Santer shows how the law is too often used as an instrument of violence against migrants, who fall outside of conventional structures of legal rights.

In Myanmar’s Kalay Valley, a rice-growing region near the Indian border, farmers have long been subject to violence and neglect. Surviving the State considers how these farmers’ everyday, land-based practices enable them to endure successive authoritarian regimes. Through robust ethnography, Hilary Oliva Faxon describes how Burman and Chin smallholders treat land not only as a source of food, but also as a living thing entwined with the families it supports. She considers the centrality of land both to state efforts at control and to inhabitants’ ability to articulate claims, looking at how locals evade, obfuscate, and reinvent legal boundaries in the face of seizures, redistribution, and revolution. Providing a feminist ethnography of land politics, Surviving the State is a testament to the daily work of survival in the face of political violence.