No abstract
Contemporary liberal assertions equate illegal oppression and practices of expulsion from the juridical order with exclusion from humanity. It is often argued that violence ensuing from the abandonment of persons beyond the pale of the law not only violates their humanity but also, and perhaps more crucially dehumanizes them or constitutes them as less than human. While the objective of these critical assertions is to expose the radical evil that illegal violence can institute, they also establish an equation between the protection of the law and the constitution of humanity, effectively granting the former a magical power to endow the latter. Moreover, these critical assertions reproduce a particular conviction that humanity is a status to be recognized and conferred, or seized and taken away. Rather than leave this relation between humanity and the law intact, by pointing to its political instrumentality in contemporary human rights campaigns, this paper examines what this relation does to politics and to subjects of violence beyond its instrumental use directed at highlighting the suffering of subjects (by employing a dehumanization rhetoric) and at insisting on human-rights-based remedies to combat it. The paper asks the following questions. First, what conceptual and theoretical assumptions about humanity and the law, as well as about the relation between them, make possible the dehumanization argument? Second, to what degree has the law's conception of humanity as a status moved beyond the juridical field, leading many humanist practitioners to assert, albeit critically, that certain groups and individuals are dehumanized? And, finally, what other ways of being human are foreclosed by the conceptual assumptions grounding the law-based humanity argument?
Esmeir’s essay considers the mission statement of the Journal of the Society of Comparative Legislation (1896-97) alongside the 2013 mission statement of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Joining them, Esmeir contends, is the reference to the method of comparison, and separating them are the details of the comparative practice, its ends and its powers. More specifically, the main difference between the two journals concerns the fate of the world covered on their pages: the first engages in comparative destruction, the second in comparative construction. The essay makes an argument for the value of research projects that examine these two relationships to the world.
At least two articulations of the human occupied the historical stage of colonial Egypt around the turn of the twentieth century. The first was juridical and secular; the second was Islamic and mystical. Belonging to two traditions, the first enjoyed concrete colonial-institutional support; the second, deprived of institutional backing, was marginalised in the colonisation of Egypt and the consolidation of the modern state. This article explores these two articulations of the human and how they intersected hierarchically in Egypt. One significant point of intersection was what came to be known as the 'woman question'; it highlighted the concrete gendered meanings of both concepts and their historical disciplinary operations.In the course of debating the nature of the liberation of women, recourse was made to the figure of the human, particularly by Qasim Amin, a major reformer and jurist in Egypt. Anticipating contemporary feminist arguments that 'women's rights are human rights', Amin mapped out the liberation of women on the path of becoming human. Amin's recourse to the human was by no means unique to Egypt. Charlotte Perkins Gilman also famously asked in 1912 whether women were human beings. 1 There is also the long history of women's struggles in France demanding rights equal to those of men that were inscribed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. 2 Yet, Amin's preoccupation with the humanity of women also shed light on the respective traditions that informed his own conceptualisation of women's humanity. Written during the era of English colonial rule, his texts manifested affinities with the colonial understanding of the human that sought to humanise the colonised. His texts also wrestled with aspects of the Islamic tradition and their translation into modern secular terms. Amin's writings, then, are a fruitful site for interrogating competing concepts of the human and how they confronted each other to produce a particular gendered concept. In the process, he curtailed other scenarios for conceiving of gender and the human, and in colonial fashion disposed of other traditions guiding how human subjects can go about living and acting politically in this world.What follows is an examination of these competing articulations and their intersection in the writings of Amin on gender. The first two parts of this article examine the two concepts of the human -the secular-juridical and the Islamic-mystical -and the third analyses their intersection, the hierarchy that came to organise the relationship C 2011 Blackwell Publishing
Modern state law is an expansive force that permeates life and politics. Law's histories—colonial, revolutionary, and postcolonial—tell of its constitutive centrality to the making of colonies and modern states. Its powers intertwine with life itself; they attempt to direct it, shape its most intimate spheres, decide on the constitutive line dividing public from private, and take over the space and time in which life unfolds. These powers settle in the present, eliminate past authorities, and dictate futures. Gendering and constitutive of sexual difference, law's powers endeavor to mold subjects and alter how they orient themselves to others and to the world. But these powers are neither coherent nor finite. They are ripe with contradictions and conflicting desires. They are also incapable of eliminating other authorities, paths, and horizons of living; these do not vanish but remain not only thinkable and articulable but also a resource for the living. Such are some of the overlapping and accumulative interventions of the two books under review: Sara Pursley's Familiar Futures and Judith Surkis's Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria. What follows is an attempt to further develop these interventions by thinking with some of the books’ underlying arguments. Familiar Futures is a history of Iraq, beginning with the British colonial-mandate period and concluding with the 1958 Revolution and its immediate aftermath. Sex, Law, and Sovereignty is a history of “French Algeria” that covers a century of French colonization from 1830 to 1930. The books converge on key questions concerning how modern law and the modern state—colonial and postcolonial—articulated sexual difference and governed social and intimate life, including through the rise of personal-status law as a separate domain of law constitutive of the conjugal family. Both books are consequently also preoccupied with the relationship between sex, gender, and sovereignty. And both contain resources for living along paths not charted by the modern state and its juridical apparatus.
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