This article examines Nuruddin Farah's 1979 novel Sweet and Sour Milk, asking how we read rep... more This article examines Nuruddin Farah's 1979 novel Sweet and Sour Milk, asking how we read representations of postcolonial mourning and living death in the context of global authoritarianism. The first novel in Farah's influential dictatorship trilogy, Sweet and Sour Milk introduces us to “the General,” a fictionalized version of Siyad Barre, who ruled Somalia from 1969 to 1991. Like Barre's, the General's power exemplifies what Achille Mbembe calls “necropolitics,” or “the contemporary subjugation of life to the power of death.” The General's necropower manifests, peculiarly, as a politics of substitution—that is, when he takes a life, he leaves something in its place. Rebels do not simply disappear; they are killed and then given sycophantic zombie afterlives in the General's propaganda. In response to this politics of substitution, Farah explores a politics of mourning, which insists upon the irreplaceability of lost love objects and thereby broadly reveals what truly can and cannot be substituted. The General insists on the uniqueness of his power, for example, but Farah reveals it to be a cliché, easily substituted by that of other dictators throughout history. Cliché becomes revolutionary in this way, suggesting that dictators share a common fate: they will be deposed or, eventually, die of old age. However, like a horde of the living dead, others like them will return. The article concludes with analysis of the apparent pessimism of this point and the global implications of Farah's ideas about both necropolitics and the limits of the novel form in the face of authoritarian power.
Chapter two examines Kenyan orature and revolutionary performance in relationship to the history ... more Chapter two examines Kenyan orature and revolutionary performance in relationship to the history of colonial labour law, which became increasingly oppressive through emergency regulations. Among the most important responses to this history is that offered by novelist, activist, and playwright Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Recognizing that the state and the oral artist are “rivals” in articulating and disseminating the law and, further, that orature played “the most important role” in anti-colonial struggles, Ngũgĩ draws heavily on Kikuyu and other Kenyan oral traditions in addressing the history of exceptionalized labour law and its lasting effects in the postcolonial period. Through workers’ songs, revolutionary hymns, proverbs, and myths, Ngũgĩ’s theatre draws on the performative force of oral jurisprudence to challenge the temporal foundations of colonial labour law and also explore alternative models of democratic work that embody a vision of Kenya’s future. Specifically, I argue that through oratorical strategies (including formal open-endedness) in The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (1976) and “Mother, Sing for Me” (1983), Ngũgĩ and his co-authors “[break] the barrier between formal and infinite time,” constellating (in the Benjaminian sense) past moments of revolution with both the present and possible revolutionary futures.
This chapter examines colonial responses to African oral jurisprudence as it interacted with laws... more This chapter examines colonial responses to African oral jurisprudence as it interacted with laws that recast resistance to colonialism as evidence of an African crisis of modernity. The origins of this crisis discourse become clear in two trials that correspond to significant moments in colonial Kenya and in the evolution of legalistic orature’s challenge to colonial law. In Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa (1937), a “traditional” Kikuyu court convenes to resolve a crisis that has disrupted Dinsen’s pastoral fantasy of Africa as a home for her aristocratic values. She attempts to control the court through a written contract but is frustrated as orature exposes the true crisis of modernity within colonialism. Similarly, Montagu Slater’s The Trial of Jomo Kenyatta (1955) emphasizes the tension between African orality and colonial literacy in the famous Emergency-era trial. Slater shows how orature challenged the meaning of written evidence and, like the court on Dinesen’s farm, exposed the crisis discourse as evidence of an ongoing crisis within colonialism itself. These trials enable necessary perspectives on the larger picture of law, orature, and literature in colonial East Africa.
Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Jul 11, 2014
This essay offers a reading of utopian and dystopian imaginaries in East African fiction in the c... more This essay offers a reading of utopian and dystopian imaginaries in East African fiction in the context of both spatial theory and cultural legal studies. Focusing on Kusadikika by Shabaan Robert (1951) and Wizard of the Crow by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (2006), my analysis meets the spatial turn in critical theory at the point where it has recently intersected with both law and African studies. At this nexus, we find, among other things, the figure of utopia. Traditionally conceived in temporal terms (i.e. as a future ideal), utopias in Robert and Ngũgĩ's texts develop as uniquely spatialized visions of possible futures. Furthermore, whereas scholars have discussed the extent to which utopia is or is not compatible with law – i.e. is utopia formed through the perfection of law or its complete absence? – these narratives depict law as essential to both dystopia and utopia, its presence and necessity almost taken for granted. This suggests that the question we should ask, therefore, is not ‘Is there law in utopia?’ (the answer will always be ‘yes’) but ‘Where is law in utopia?’ In other words, the location or spatiality of law is essential to a society's status as either utopian or dystopian. In examining the interrelationships of these different phenomena, my ultimate purpose in this essay is to try to make sense of the coincidence of a spatially oriented utopian impulse and questions of law and territorial redefinition in Robert's and Ngũgĩ's texts. I ask: What can we make of the intersection of law and utopia in East African narratives whose setting, geographical location, or topos, at the threshold of the Indian Ocean lends itself to thinking transnationally, or even post-nationally? Is there such a thing as a ‘transnational utopia’? Or is the transnational in its global capitalist manifestations necessarily a form of dystopia?
The introductory chapter establishes a critical framework for reading oral jurisprudence in East ... more The introductory chapter establishes a critical framework for reading oral jurisprudence in East Africa in relationship to narratives of temporality in British colonial law, colonial and postcolonial literatures, and modern law generally. I begin with a brief analysis of the 2012 trial Mutua and others v. The Foreign Commonwealth Office to illustrate the relationship between law and time and the lasting effects of the British Empire’s “crisis of modernity,” or simultaneous promotion of and retreat from modernity as it faced resistance in the colonies. I then theorize the oral-legalistic strategies that colonial subjects developed to exploit this crisis and restore, imaginatively at first, what was lost in the encounter with colonial time. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has argued that orature, in particular, “played the most important role” in anti-colonial struggles, and this is so because of its relationship to the deep history of colonial law, which unwittingly empowered legalistic orature with the force of subversion as well as restoration. I conclude with a discussion of East Africa’s important but misunderstood place in the history and development of modern law.
The conclusion briefly returns to the question of East Africa’s place in the history of modern la... more The conclusion briefly returns to the question of East Africa’s place in the history of modern law. It argues, through a reading of Shaaban Robert’s Kiswahili parable Kusadikika: A Country in the Sky (1951), that the models of oral jurisprudence offered by East Africa’s many writers who touch on, investigate, or otherwise sing about the legacies of colonial law and the crisis of modernity may ultimately offer new ways of thinking about modern law itself. More specifically, these models reveal how “modern law” is not an invention of the West, but a product of a long, complex, and often violent collaboration between the Global North and Global South.
This article examines Nuruddin Farah's 1979 novel Sweet and Sour Milk, asking how we read rep... more This article examines Nuruddin Farah's 1979 novel Sweet and Sour Milk, asking how we read representations of postcolonial mourning and living death in the context of global authoritarianism. The first novel in Farah's influential dictatorship trilogy, Sweet and Sour Milk introduces us to “the General,” a fictionalized version of Siyad Barre, who ruled Somalia from 1969 to 1991. Like Barre's, the General's power exemplifies what Achille Mbembe calls “necropolitics,” or “the contemporary subjugation of life to the power of death.” The General's necropower manifests, peculiarly, as a politics of substitution—that is, when he takes a life, he leaves something in its place. Rebels do not simply disappear; they are killed and then given sycophantic zombie afterlives in the General's propaganda. In response to this politics of substitution, Farah explores a politics of mourning, which insists upon the irreplaceability of lost love objects and thereby broadly reveals...
Authors in the global Anglophone world have long been interested in the phenomenon of dictatorshi... more Authors in the global Anglophone world have long been interested in the phenomenon of dictatorships, often more by necessity than by choice as many of them personally witnessed the horrors of authoritarian rule. Among scholars, increasing attention is being given to dictatorships and the fictions that depict or otherwise respond to them in Anglophone contexts. Africa, in particular, has seen an explosion of literary texts and scholarly output, although there are important contributions from authors in South Asia, the Caribbean, and even the United States. Throughout these texts, which include novels, short fiction, plays, and poetry, authors take the authoritarian and his methods, enemies, and inevitable downfall as their subject. The reasons for doing so vary. Some authors barely veil the inspiration for their fictional leaders, intending to challenge actual dictators, sometimes at great risk and sacrifice. Others use fictional dictatorships to explore issues of sovereignty, neocol...
Chapter three examines the emergence of dictatorships in post-independence Africa. In his dictato... more Chapter three examines the emergence of dictatorships in post-independence Africa. In his dictatorship-trilogy (1979-1983), Nuruddin Farah provides a fictional account of the state of emergency that was Siad Barre’s dictatorship in Somalia (1969-1991). Like Okot and Ngũgĩ, Farah also draws heavily on oral conventions, specifically those tied to Xeer, or Somali oral law. However, legalistic orature in Somalia is available not only to revolutionaries but to the dictator himself, who turns oral poetry to his purposes. Farah, therefore, asks: if orature can serve injustice as easily as justice, can it be effective in challenging dictatorial power? The presence of orality coincides once again with a temporal motif, punctuated at the end of each novel with formal open-endedness. In the context of Somalia’s legal history, this open-endedness provides a definite, though perplexing, solution to the problem of colonial/postcolonial crisis seen in previous chapters: as one of Farah’s character...
<p>Chapter two examines Kenyan orature and revolutionary performance in relationship to the... more <p>Chapter two examines Kenyan orature and revolutionary performance in relationship to the history of colonial labour law, which became increasingly oppressive through emergency regulations. Among the most important responses to this history is that offered by novelist, activist, and playwright Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. Recognizing that the state and the oral artist are "rivals" in articulating and disseminating the law and, further, that orature played "the most important role" in anti-colonial struggles, Ngũgĩ draws heavily on Kikuyu and other Kenyan oral traditions in addressing the history of exceptionalized labour law and its lasting effects in the postcolonial period. Through workers' songs, revolutionary hymns, proverbs, and myths, Ngũgĩ's theatre draws on the performative force of oral jurisprudence to challenge the temporal foundations of colonial labour law and also explore alternative models of democratic work that embody a vision of Kenya's future. Specifically, I argue that through oratorical strategies (including formal open-endedness) in <italic>The Trial of Dedan Kimathi</italic> (1976) and "Mother, Sing for Me" (1983), Ngũgĩ and his co-authors "[break] the barrier between formal and infinite time," constellating (in the Benjaminian sense) past moments of revolution with both the present and possible revolutionary futures.</p>
This essay offers a reading of utopian and dystopian imaginaries in East African fiction in the c... more This essay offers a reading of utopian and dystopian imaginaries in East African fiction in the context of both spatial theory and cultural legal studies. Focusing on Kusadikika by Shabaan Robert (1951) and Wizard of the Crow by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (2006), my analysis meets the spatial turn in critical theory at the point where it has recently intersected with both law and African studies. At this nexus, we find, among other things, the figure of utopia. Traditionally conceived in temporal terms (i.e. as a future ideal), utopias in Robert and Ngũgĩ's texts develop as uniquely spatialized visions of possible futures. Furthermore, whereas scholars have discussed the extent to which utopia is or is not compatible with law – i.e. is utopia formed through the perfection of law or its complete absence? – these narratives depict law as essential to both dystopia and utopia, its presence and necessity almost taken for granted. This suggests that the question we should ask, therefore, is not ‘Is there law in utopia?’ (the answer will always be ‘yes’) but ‘Where is law in utopia?’ In other words, the location or spatiality of law is essential to a society's status as either utopian or dystopian. In examining the interrelationships of these different phenomena, my ultimate purpose in this essay is to try to make sense of the coincidence of a spatially oriented utopian impulse and questions of law and territorial redefinition in Robert's and Ngũgĩ's texts. I ask: What can we make of the intersection of law and utopia in East African narratives whose setting, geographical location, or topos, at the threshold of the Indian Ocean lends itself to thinking transnationally, or even post-nationally? Is there such a thing as a ‘transnational utopia’? Or is the transnational in its global capitalist manifestations necessarily a form of dystopia?
The conclusion briefly returns to the question of East Africa’s place in the history of modern la... more The conclusion briefly returns to the question of East Africa’s place in the history of modern law. It argues, through a reading of Shaaban Robert’s Kiswahili parable Kusadikika: A Country in the Sky (1951), that the models of oral jurisprudence offered by East Africa’s many writers who touch on, investigate, or otherwise sing about the legacies of colonial law and the crisis of modernity may ultimately offer new ways of thinking about modern law itself. More specifically, these models reveal how “modern law” is not an invention of the West, but a product of a long, complex, and often violent collaboration between the Global North and Global South.
Despite Percy Shelly’s statement that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” fe... more Despite Percy Shelly’s statement that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” few poets typically see themselves performing a law-making function. One who did, however, was the Ugandan poet Okot p’Bitek. In light of his legal education in Wales (which has been overshadowed by his ethnographic education at Oxford), I examine p’Bitek’s view that the traditional African poet creates “central ideas” that, in effect, constitute a system of law. As an example, I consider the concept of restorative justice (drawn from a Ugandan legal tradition) as it functions thematically and structurally in his poem Song of Lawino and offers a critique of the punitive measures of colonial law. p’Bitek maintained that the colonial legal systems that African inherited were ill-suited to dealing with the challenges of the post- and neo-colonial world and, in fact, perpetuated many of those challenges by creating a gap between distinctively African values and the laws to which such values we...
The introductory chapter establishes a critical framework for reading oral jurisprudence in East ... more The introductory chapter establishes a critical framework for reading oral jurisprudence in East Africa in relationship to narratives of temporality in British colonial law, colonial and postcolonial literatures, and modern law generally. I begin with a brief analysis of the 2012 trial Mutua and others v. The Foreign Commonwealth Office to illustrate the relationship between law and time and the lasting effects of the British Empire’s “crisis of modernity,” or simultaneous promotion of and retreat from modernity as it faced resistance in the colonies. I then theorize the oral-legalistic strategies that colonial subjects developed to exploit this crisis and restore, imaginatively at first, what was lost in the encounter with colonial time. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has argued that orature, in particular, “played the most important role” in anti-colonial struggles, and this is so because of its relationship to the deep history of colonial law, which unwittingly empowered legalistic orature wi...
In his essay, “Violence and the Word,” the late legal scholar Robert Cover offers an unusual defi... more In his essay, “Violence and the Word,” the late legal scholar Robert Cover offers an unusual definition of law as “the projection of an imagined future upon reality” (1604). Setting aside the, perhaps, unintentional suggestion that law is a kind of speculative fiction, this definition enables us to see a distinct colonial impulse in the law: the colonization of a present reality by some imagined, future ideal. Law is, by this account, a better, even more civilized future imposed on reality with the hope of bringing that reality up to its (impossible? unrealistic?) standard. This is a striking—and, no doubt, debatable—characterization, particularly when seen in light of the law’s dramatic temporalization in the history of European colonization, a time when law was equated with modernity and thereby projected onto the complex and heterogeneous realities of subjected peoples the world over. Although Cover’s definition has a hint of the utopian, the imagined future of modernity and prog...
This article examines Nuruddin Farah's 1979 novel Sweet and Sour Milk, asking how we read rep... more This article examines Nuruddin Farah's 1979 novel Sweet and Sour Milk, asking how we read representations of postcolonial mourning and living death in the context of global authoritarianism. The first novel in Farah's influential dictatorship trilogy, Sweet and Sour Milk introduces us to “the General,” a fictionalized version of Siyad Barre, who ruled Somalia from 1969 to 1991. Like Barre's, the General's power exemplifies what Achille Mbembe calls “necropolitics,” or “the contemporary subjugation of life to the power of death.” The General's necropower manifests, peculiarly, as a politics of substitution—that is, when he takes a life, he leaves something in its place. Rebels do not simply disappear; they are killed and then given sycophantic zombie afterlives in the General's propaganda. In response to this politics of substitution, Farah explores a politics of mourning, which insists upon the irreplaceability of lost love objects and thereby broadly reveals what truly can and cannot be substituted. The General insists on the uniqueness of his power, for example, but Farah reveals it to be a cliché, easily substituted by that of other dictators throughout history. Cliché becomes revolutionary in this way, suggesting that dictators share a common fate: they will be deposed or, eventually, die of old age. However, like a horde of the living dead, others like them will return. The article concludes with analysis of the apparent pessimism of this point and the global implications of Farah's ideas about both necropolitics and the limits of the novel form in the face of authoritarian power.
Chapter two examines Kenyan orature and revolutionary performance in relationship to the history ... more Chapter two examines Kenyan orature and revolutionary performance in relationship to the history of colonial labour law, which became increasingly oppressive through emergency regulations. Among the most important responses to this history is that offered by novelist, activist, and playwright Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Recognizing that the state and the oral artist are “rivals” in articulating and disseminating the law and, further, that orature played “the most important role” in anti-colonial struggles, Ngũgĩ draws heavily on Kikuyu and other Kenyan oral traditions in addressing the history of exceptionalized labour law and its lasting effects in the postcolonial period. Through workers’ songs, revolutionary hymns, proverbs, and myths, Ngũgĩ’s theatre draws on the performative force of oral jurisprudence to challenge the temporal foundations of colonial labour law and also explore alternative models of democratic work that embody a vision of Kenya’s future. Specifically, I argue that through oratorical strategies (including formal open-endedness) in The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (1976) and “Mother, Sing for Me” (1983), Ngũgĩ and his co-authors “[break] the barrier between formal and infinite time,” constellating (in the Benjaminian sense) past moments of revolution with both the present and possible revolutionary futures.
This chapter examines colonial responses to African oral jurisprudence as it interacted with laws... more This chapter examines colonial responses to African oral jurisprudence as it interacted with laws that recast resistance to colonialism as evidence of an African crisis of modernity. The origins of this crisis discourse become clear in two trials that correspond to significant moments in colonial Kenya and in the evolution of legalistic orature’s challenge to colonial law. In Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa (1937), a “traditional” Kikuyu court convenes to resolve a crisis that has disrupted Dinsen’s pastoral fantasy of Africa as a home for her aristocratic values. She attempts to control the court through a written contract but is frustrated as orature exposes the true crisis of modernity within colonialism. Similarly, Montagu Slater’s The Trial of Jomo Kenyatta (1955) emphasizes the tension between African orality and colonial literacy in the famous Emergency-era trial. Slater shows how orature challenged the meaning of written evidence and, like the court on Dinesen’s farm, exposed the crisis discourse as evidence of an ongoing crisis within colonialism itself. These trials enable necessary perspectives on the larger picture of law, orature, and literature in colonial East Africa.
Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Jul 11, 2014
This essay offers a reading of utopian and dystopian imaginaries in East African fiction in the c... more This essay offers a reading of utopian and dystopian imaginaries in East African fiction in the context of both spatial theory and cultural legal studies. Focusing on Kusadikika by Shabaan Robert (1951) and Wizard of the Crow by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (2006), my analysis meets the spatial turn in critical theory at the point where it has recently intersected with both law and African studies. At this nexus, we find, among other things, the figure of utopia. Traditionally conceived in temporal terms (i.e. as a future ideal), utopias in Robert and Ngũgĩ's texts develop as uniquely spatialized visions of possible futures. Furthermore, whereas scholars have discussed the extent to which utopia is or is not compatible with law – i.e. is utopia formed through the perfection of law or its complete absence? – these narratives depict law as essential to both dystopia and utopia, its presence and necessity almost taken for granted. This suggests that the question we should ask, therefore, is not ‘Is there law in utopia?’ (the answer will always be ‘yes’) but ‘Where is law in utopia?’ In other words, the location or spatiality of law is essential to a society's status as either utopian or dystopian. In examining the interrelationships of these different phenomena, my ultimate purpose in this essay is to try to make sense of the coincidence of a spatially oriented utopian impulse and questions of law and territorial redefinition in Robert's and Ngũgĩ's texts. I ask: What can we make of the intersection of law and utopia in East African narratives whose setting, geographical location, or topos, at the threshold of the Indian Ocean lends itself to thinking transnationally, or even post-nationally? Is there such a thing as a ‘transnational utopia’? Or is the transnational in its global capitalist manifestations necessarily a form of dystopia?
The introductory chapter establishes a critical framework for reading oral jurisprudence in East ... more The introductory chapter establishes a critical framework for reading oral jurisprudence in East Africa in relationship to narratives of temporality in British colonial law, colonial and postcolonial literatures, and modern law generally. I begin with a brief analysis of the 2012 trial Mutua and others v. The Foreign Commonwealth Office to illustrate the relationship between law and time and the lasting effects of the British Empire’s “crisis of modernity,” or simultaneous promotion of and retreat from modernity as it faced resistance in the colonies. I then theorize the oral-legalistic strategies that colonial subjects developed to exploit this crisis and restore, imaginatively at first, what was lost in the encounter with colonial time. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has argued that orature, in particular, “played the most important role” in anti-colonial struggles, and this is so because of its relationship to the deep history of colonial law, which unwittingly empowered legalistic orature with the force of subversion as well as restoration. I conclude with a discussion of East Africa’s important but misunderstood place in the history and development of modern law.
The conclusion briefly returns to the question of East Africa’s place in the history of modern la... more The conclusion briefly returns to the question of East Africa’s place in the history of modern law. It argues, through a reading of Shaaban Robert’s Kiswahili parable Kusadikika: A Country in the Sky (1951), that the models of oral jurisprudence offered by East Africa’s many writers who touch on, investigate, or otherwise sing about the legacies of colonial law and the crisis of modernity may ultimately offer new ways of thinking about modern law itself. More specifically, these models reveal how “modern law” is not an invention of the West, but a product of a long, complex, and often violent collaboration between the Global North and Global South.
This article examines Nuruddin Farah's 1979 novel Sweet and Sour Milk, asking how we read rep... more This article examines Nuruddin Farah's 1979 novel Sweet and Sour Milk, asking how we read representations of postcolonial mourning and living death in the context of global authoritarianism. The first novel in Farah's influential dictatorship trilogy, Sweet and Sour Milk introduces us to “the General,” a fictionalized version of Siyad Barre, who ruled Somalia from 1969 to 1991. Like Barre's, the General's power exemplifies what Achille Mbembe calls “necropolitics,” or “the contemporary subjugation of life to the power of death.” The General's necropower manifests, peculiarly, as a politics of substitution—that is, when he takes a life, he leaves something in its place. Rebels do not simply disappear; they are killed and then given sycophantic zombie afterlives in the General's propaganda. In response to this politics of substitution, Farah explores a politics of mourning, which insists upon the irreplaceability of lost love objects and thereby broadly reveals...
Authors in the global Anglophone world have long been interested in the phenomenon of dictatorshi... more Authors in the global Anglophone world have long been interested in the phenomenon of dictatorships, often more by necessity than by choice as many of them personally witnessed the horrors of authoritarian rule. Among scholars, increasing attention is being given to dictatorships and the fictions that depict or otherwise respond to them in Anglophone contexts. Africa, in particular, has seen an explosion of literary texts and scholarly output, although there are important contributions from authors in South Asia, the Caribbean, and even the United States. Throughout these texts, which include novels, short fiction, plays, and poetry, authors take the authoritarian and his methods, enemies, and inevitable downfall as their subject. The reasons for doing so vary. Some authors barely veil the inspiration for their fictional leaders, intending to challenge actual dictators, sometimes at great risk and sacrifice. Others use fictional dictatorships to explore issues of sovereignty, neocol...
Chapter three examines the emergence of dictatorships in post-independence Africa. In his dictato... more Chapter three examines the emergence of dictatorships in post-independence Africa. In his dictatorship-trilogy (1979-1983), Nuruddin Farah provides a fictional account of the state of emergency that was Siad Barre’s dictatorship in Somalia (1969-1991). Like Okot and Ngũgĩ, Farah also draws heavily on oral conventions, specifically those tied to Xeer, or Somali oral law. However, legalistic orature in Somalia is available not only to revolutionaries but to the dictator himself, who turns oral poetry to his purposes. Farah, therefore, asks: if orature can serve injustice as easily as justice, can it be effective in challenging dictatorial power? The presence of orality coincides once again with a temporal motif, punctuated at the end of each novel with formal open-endedness. In the context of Somalia’s legal history, this open-endedness provides a definite, though perplexing, solution to the problem of colonial/postcolonial crisis seen in previous chapters: as one of Farah’s character...
<p>Chapter two examines Kenyan orature and revolutionary performance in relationship to the... more <p>Chapter two examines Kenyan orature and revolutionary performance in relationship to the history of colonial labour law, which became increasingly oppressive through emergency regulations. Among the most important responses to this history is that offered by novelist, activist, and playwright Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. Recognizing that the state and the oral artist are "rivals" in articulating and disseminating the law and, further, that orature played "the most important role" in anti-colonial struggles, Ngũgĩ draws heavily on Kikuyu and other Kenyan oral traditions in addressing the history of exceptionalized labour law and its lasting effects in the postcolonial period. Through workers' songs, revolutionary hymns, proverbs, and myths, Ngũgĩ's theatre draws on the performative force of oral jurisprudence to challenge the temporal foundations of colonial labour law and also explore alternative models of democratic work that embody a vision of Kenya's future. Specifically, I argue that through oratorical strategies (including formal open-endedness) in <italic>The Trial of Dedan Kimathi</italic> (1976) and "Mother, Sing for Me" (1983), Ngũgĩ and his co-authors "[break] the barrier between formal and infinite time," constellating (in the Benjaminian sense) past moments of revolution with both the present and possible revolutionary futures.</p>
This essay offers a reading of utopian and dystopian imaginaries in East African fiction in the c... more This essay offers a reading of utopian and dystopian imaginaries in East African fiction in the context of both spatial theory and cultural legal studies. Focusing on Kusadikika by Shabaan Robert (1951) and Wizard of the Crow by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (2006), my analysis meets the spatial turn in critical theory at the point where it has recently intersected with both law and African studies. At this nexus, we find, among other things, the figure of utopia. Traditionally conceived in temporal terms (i.e. as a future ideal), utopias in Robert and Ngũgĩ's texts develop as uniquely spatialized visions of possible futures. Furthermore, whereas scholars have discussed the extent to which utopia is or is not compatible with law – i.e. is utopia formed through the perfection of law or its complete absence? – these narratives depict law as essential to both dystopia and utopia, its presence and necessity almost taken for granted. This suggests that the question we should ask, therefore, is not ‘Is there law in utopia?’ (the answer will always be ‘yes’) but ‘Where is law in utopia?’ In other words, the location or spatiality of law is essential to a society's status as either utopian or dystopian. In examining the interrelationships of these different phenomena, my ultimate purpose in this essay is to try to make sense of the coincidence of a spatially oriented utopian impulse and questions of law and territorial redefinition in Robert's and Ngũgĩ's texts. I ask: What can we make of the intersection of law and utopia in East African narratives whose setting, geographical location, or topos, at the threshold of the Indian Ocean lends itself to thinking transnationally, or even post-nationally? Is there such a thing as a ‘transnational utopia’? Or is the transnational in its global capitalist manifestations necessarily a form of dystopia?
The conclusion briefly returns to the question of East Africa’s place in the history of modern la... more The conclusion briefly returns to the question of East Africa’s place in the history of modern law. It argues, through a reading of Shaaban Robert’s Kiswahili parable Kusadikika: A Country in the Sky (1951), that the models of oral jurisprudence offered by East Africa’s many writers who touch on, investigate, or otherwise sing about the legacies of colonial law and the crisis of modernity may ultimately offer new ways of thinking about modern law itself. More specifically, these models reveal how “modern law” is not an invention of the West, but a product of a long, complex, and often violent collaboration between the Global North and Global South.
Despite Percy Shelly’s statement that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” fe... more Despite Percy Shelly’s statement that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” few poets typically see themselves performing a law-making function. One who did, however, was the Ugandan poet Okot p’Bitek. In light of his legal education in Wales (which has been overshadowed by his ethnographic education at Oxford), I examine p’Bitek’s view that the traditional African poet creates “central ideas” that, in effect, constitute a system of law. As an example, I consider the concept of restorative justice (drawn from a Ugandan legal tradition) as it functions thematically and structurally in his poem Song of Lawino and offers a critique of the punitive measures of colonial law. p’Bitek maintained that the colonial legal systems that African inherited were ill-suited to dealing with the challenges of the post- and neo-colonial world and, in fact, perpetuated many of those challenges by creating a gap between distinctively African values and the laws to which such values we...
The introductory chapter establishes a critical framework for reading oral jurisprudence in East ... more The introductory chapter establishes a critical framework for reading oral jurisprudence in East Africa in relationship to narratives of temporality in British colonial law, colonial and postcolonial literatures, and modern law generally. I begin with a brief analysis of the 2012 trial Mutua and others v. The Foreign Commonwealth Office to illustrate the relationship between law and time and the lasting effects of the British Empire’s “crisis of modernity,” or simultaneous promotion of and retreat from modernity as it faced resistance in the colonies. I then theorize the oral-legalistic strategies that colonial subjects developed to exploit this crisis and restore, imaginatively at first, what was lost in the encounter with colonial time. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has argued that orature, in particular, “played the most important role” in anti-colonial struggles, and this is so because of its relationship to the deep history of colonial law, which unwittingly empowered legalistic orature wi...
In his essay, “Violence and the Word,” the late legal scholar Robert Cover offers an unusual defi... more In his essay, “Violence and the Word,” the late legal scholar Robert Cover offers an unusual definition of law as “the projection of an imagined future upon reality” (1604). Setting aside the, perhaps, unintentional suggestion that law is a kind of speculative fiction, this definition enables us to see a distinct colonial impulse in the law: the colonization of a present reality by some imagined, future ideal. Law is, by this account, a better, even more civilized future imposed on reality with the hope of bringing that reality up to its (impossible? unrealistic?) standard. This is a striking—and, no doubt, debatable—characterization, particularly when seen in light of the law’s dramatic temporalization in the history of European colonization, a time when law was equated with modernity and thereby projected onto the complex and heterogeneous realities of subjected peoples the world over. Although Cover’s definition has a hint of the utopian, the imagined future of modernity and prog...
Singing the Law is about the legal lives and afterlives of oral cultures in East Africa, particul... more Singing the Law is about the legal lives and afterlives of oral cultures in East Africa, particularly as they appear within the pages of written literatures during the colonial and postcolonial periods. In examining these cultures, I begin with an analysis of the cultural narratives of time and modernity that formed the foundations of British colonial law. Recognizing the contradictory nature of these narratives (i.e., both promoting and retreating from the Euro-centric ideal of temporal progress) enables us to make sense of the many representations of and experiments with non-linear, open-ended, and otherwise experimental temporalities that we find in works of East African literature that take colonial law as a subject or point of critique. Many of these works, furthermore, consciously appropriate orature as an expressive form with legal authority. This affords them the capacity to challenge the narrative foundations of colonial law and its postcolonial residues and offer alternative models of temporality and modernity that give rise, in turn, to alternative forms of legality. East Africa’s “oral jurisprudence” ultimately has implications not only for our understanding of law and literature in colonial and postcolonial contexts, but more broadly for our understanding of how the global south has shaped modern law as we know and experience it today. http://dev-liverpoolup.cloudpublish.co.uk/books/id/52668/
Uploads
Papers by Peter Leman