Law Text Culture

Volume 7, 2003

Special Issue - Making Law Visible:
Past and Present Histories and Postcolonial Theory

Special Issue Editors: Nan Seuffert and Cathy Coleborne

This special issue seeks to stimulate and recognize interdisciplinary analyses that make visible the operation of the law at the intersections of race, class and gender from colonial times to the present through the lenses of postcolonial theory. Postcolonial theory provides tools for analyses of the central dynamics of colonial imperialism, including the transmission of gendered power through the formations of the modern nation-state and the control of colonized women, the emergence of global cultural knowledges, and the imperial command of commodity capital.

We are interested in analyses of the operation of the law at the intersections of race, class and gender from colonial times to the present through the lenses of postcolonial theory, including:

• the raced and gendered inscription of modern power into colonial practices of rule, at both the centres and margins
• past and present parallels of the raced and gendered aspects of global social and cultural knowledges
• raced and gendered aspects of boundaries and boundary markers of colonial nations, including analyses of raced and gendered practices of migration and immigration
• law's ambiguous placing of white women within colonization
• how the resistance of colonized women shaped the law and its historical accounts
• the specific methodological and theoretical challenges that apply to this kind of work
• 'new' methodological and theoretical approaches
• the gendered promises of postcoloniality.

CONTENTS

Law, History and Postcolonial Theory and Method

Law, History and Postcolonial Theory and Method
Nan Seuffert and Catharine Coleborne

Writing and Praxis: Law, History and the Postcolonial
Ian Duncanson

The Problem of the Fetish in Law, History and Postcolonial Theory
Judith Grbich

Law, Space and Place

Mapping Australian Postcolonial Landscapes: From Resistance to Reconciliation?
Mark Harris

Imperial Legacies (Post)Colonial Identities: Law, Space and the Making of Stanley Park, 1859-2001
Renisa Mawani

Poetry

Archive Box
Tony Birch

The Colony of the Dead
Tony Birch

Gender, 'Race' and Laws

The Mother Country and Her Colonial Progeny
Louise Falconer

Shaping the Modern Nation: Colonial Marriage Law, Polygamy and Concubinage in Aotearoa New Zealand
Nan Seuffert

Indigenous and 'Alien': Land Rights and Immigration Discourses

Invaders, Illegals and Aliens: Imagining Exclusion in a 'White Australia'
Catriona elder

Past the Last Post? Time, Causation and Treaty Claims History
Giselle Byrnes

Postcolonial Feudal Hauntings of Northern Australian Cattle Stations
Thalia Anthony

With original art by Efrat Arbel and Holman Wang