Postcolonial Legality

Colonised's Madness, Colonisers' Modernity and International Law: Mythological Materialism in the East-West Telos

“…In retrospect, the narrative of constitutional development in decolonized societies provides a massive indictment of accomplishments of liberal thought. 113 An ideal type investigation methodology in social sciences while serving the cause of a composite international law is much more than a simple lip-service of its relationship with semiotics. Consequently, the task of the semiotic study of history is to observe numerous individual cases abstracting typical characteristics.…”

Postcolonial penality: Liberty and repression in the shadow of independence, India c. 1947

“…Outside Africa and with particular reference to the longer standing and undeniably more liberal models of governance employed on the Indian subcontinent, Upendra Baxi (2000 : 541) has analysed the development of what he terms postcolonial legalities. His attention is drawn to constitutionalism as a defining feature of efforts of many postcolonial states to demarcate a kind of ‘historic rupture’ of independence.…”

“…His attention is drawn to constitutionalism as a defining feature of efforts of many postcolonial states to demarcate a kind of ‘historic rupture’ of independence. Thus, whereas Mamdani’s account emphasizes how new African states’ efforts to escape the colonial dispensation so often led to them immediately reproducing important parts of it, Baxi (2000 : 542) suggests that postcolonial constitutions mark at least an attempted paradigm shift, experienced even as ontological rebirth, a claim ‘to self-determination not warranted by imperial legality’. Yet ‘pathologies of power’ ( Baxi, 2000 : 551) inherent within the practice of postcolonial constitutionalism tend also towards a reproduction of certain forms of class and social order.…”

“…Here, newly independent elites quickly recuperate not only the visible trappings of colonialism but so too its visions and anxieties. ‘In many a society’, Baxi (2000 : 551) argues, ‘the bulk and generality of postcolonial “citizens” are hapless victims of “governance” beyond the pale of accountability’. The law also and importantly seems much less amenable to the kind of ontological renovation sought in postcolonial constitutionalism itself.…”

“…Yet for as much as the work of Mamdani, Baxi and others brings us closer to recognizing the inherent limitations of postcolonial statehood it is relatively silent on one important matter. This is the question as to how postcolonial states’ mimetic tendency—a tendency towards ‘the reproduction, with a range of variation’ of discourses and practices of colonial governance ( Baxi, 2000 : 544)—singles out particular individuals or groups for such treatment and the form of the settlements reached thereafter. In the last decade or so, however, a small literature has begun to emerge tracing the fractures that separated these grand narratives of postcolonial statehood from the lived experiences of individuals who, to use the title of Sherman et al’s (2014) recent collection, had been overnight transformed From Subjects to Citizens .…”