1st Edition
Spatial Justice After Apartheid Nomos in the Postcolony
This book considers the question of spatial justice after apartheid from several disciplinary perspectives – jurisprudence, law, literature, architecture, photography and psychoanalysis are just some of the disciplines engaged here. However, the main theoretical device on which the authors comment is the legacy of what in Carl Schmitt’s terms is nomos as the spatialised normativity of sociality. Each author considers within the practical and theoretical constraints of their topic, the question of what nomos in its modern configuration may or may not contribute to a thinking of spatial justice after apartheid.
On the whole, the collection forces a confrontation between law’s spatiality in a “postcolonial” era, on the one hand, and the traumatic legacy of what Paul Gilroy has called the “colonial nomos”, on the other hand. In the course of this confrontation, critical questions of continuation, extension, disruption and rewriting are raised and confronted in novel and innovative ways that both challenge Schmitt’s account of nomos and affirm the centrality of the constitutive relation between law and space. The book promises to resituate the trajectory of nomos, while considering critical instances through which the spatial legacy of apartheid might at last be overcome.
This interdisciplinary book will appeal to scholars of critical legal theory, political philosophy, aesthetics and architecture.
List of Contributors
1 Apartheid remains: Nomos, law and spatiality in post-apartheid South Africa
JACO BARNARD-NAUDÉ AND JULIA CHRYSSOSTALIS
2 Un/mapping Black life: On estranged spatialities, colonial nomos and the ruses of “post”-apartheid
JOEL M. MODIRI
3 On the San Dominick: Thinking nomos and postcolonial becoming with Melville, Schmitt and Fanon
JULIA CHRYSSOSTALIS
4 Unlearning, (un)naming, cohabiting
KARIN VAN MARLE
5 Inventaris van my bankrotskap as digter/Inventory of my poetic bankruptcy
ANTJIE KROG
6 The ground beneath our feet: Black feminist geography in South African literature
BARBARA BOSWELL
7 (Un)making Annie: Black female subjectivity, the normative (white) suburban South African home and land repossession
VICTORIA J. COLLIS-BUTHELEZI
8 “Space is space”: The nomos of apartheid, “the coloniser who refuses” and uncolonial spatiality in JM Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians
JACO BARNARD-NAUDÉ
9 Queer states: Beyond the nomos of the closet in Tendai Huchu’s The Hairdresser of Harare
DERRICK HIGGINBOTHAM
10 Abstract space: Continuation, infestation and sanitation in the South African Lawscape
ISOLDE DE VILLIERS
11 Unequal scenes
JOHNNY MILLER
12 Sense of place, virtual displacement and a nomos beyond apartheid: What value for a rights-based approach?
LORETTA FERIS AND JACO BARNARD-NAUDÉ
13 Memory Card Sea Power: Photographs by David Southwood
TEXT BY SEAN CHRISTIE FROM ‘UNDER NELSON MANDELA BOULEVARD:
LIFE AMONG THE STOWAWAYS’ AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY DAVID SOUTHWOOD
FROM ‘MEMORY CARD SEA POWER’
14 Rewriting type: Writing nomos otherwise
IAIN LOW
Index
Biography
Jaco Barnard-Naudé is Professor of Jurisprudence and Co-Director of the Centre for Rhetoric Studies (CRhS) at the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) Law Faculty, South Africa. From 2020 to 2021, he was a Research Professor in the Free State Centre for Human Rights at the University of the Free State, South Africa. He is a past recipient of the UCT Fellows’ Award and was the British Academy’s Newton Advanced Fellow in the Westminster Law and Theory Lab at the University of Westminster Law School, UK, from 2017 to 2020. Jaco holds a B2-rating from the South African National Research Foundation (NRF) and is also a past Honorary Research Fellow of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK. He publishes widely in the fields of Jurisprudence, Law and Literature, Spatial Justice, Queer Legal Theory, Contractual Justice after Apartheid and Transitional Post-Apartheid Justice.
Julia Chryssostalis is Principal Lecturer and Co-Director of the Westminster Law and Theory Lab at the University of Westminster Law School, UK. She became an academic after practising law as a lawyer in Athens, Greece, while chairing the Human Rights Education Committee of the Greek Section of Amnesty International. She has held Visiting Fellowships at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, Princeton University, USA and University of Cape Town, South Africa. Her current work is in the interface of critical legal theory and law and humanities exploring the different names and figures of nomos.
