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Narrative and legal plurality in postcolonial nations: chapter and verse from the East African Court of Appeal

Narrative and legal plurality in postcolonial nations: chapter and verse from the East African Court of Appeal
Narrative and legal plurality in postcolonial nations: chapter and verse from the East African Court of Appeal
Legal history is not only made by highest court rulings. But it is notable that as an increasingly important intellectual tradition, “law and literature” is not often exercised through intermediate judgments. While precedent-setting cases, controversial acts, and state constitutions understandably shape the field, this chapter attempts to indicate what might be gained by pausing on less renowned moments of law as a history of encountering literature. The chapter is keyed around a singular occurrence of verse in a previously unstudied case from the archive of British imperial legal history. Having introduced my case study, I work it through key debates on evidence, rhetoric, and rights. In the broadest terms and in each part, this is to focus and promote a postcolonial approach to law and literature, and to work the case through a history of ideas that manoeuvre between thoughts of an always-future possibility of a critically just law, and thoughts about the law as a critically compromised relation to justice.
imperial law, East Africa, Swahili literature, rights, evidence, rhetoric
236-252
Cambridge University Press
Jones, Stephanie
19fbdd53-fdd0-43ad-9203-7462e5f658c6
Dolin, Kieran
Jones, Stephanie
19fbdd53-fdd0-43ad-9203-7462e5f658c6
Dolin, Kieran

Jones, Stephanie (2018) Narrative and legal plurality in postcolonial nations: chapter and verse from the East African Court of Appeal. In, Dolin, Kieran (ed.) Law and Literature. (Critical Concepts) Cambridge. Cambridge University Press, pp. 236-252. (doi:10.1017/9781108386005.016).

Record type: Book Section

Abstract

Legal history is not only made by highest court rulings. But it is notable that as an increasingly important intellectual tradition, “law and literature” is not often exercised through intermediate judgments. While precedent-setting cases, controversial acts, and state constitutions understandably shape the field, this chapter attempts to indicate what might be gained by pausing on less renowned moments of law as a history of encountering literature. The chapter is keyed around a singular occurrence of verse in a previously unstudied case from the archive of British imperial legal history. Having introduced my case study, I work it through key debates on evidence, rhetoric, and rights. In the broadest terms and in each part, this is to focus and promote a postcolonial approach to law and literature, and to work the case through a history of ideas that manoeuvre between thoughts of an always-future possibility of a critically just law, and thoughts about the law as a critically compromised relation to justice.

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Accepted/In Press date: 19 February 2017
Published date: 25 January 2018
Keywords: imperial law, East Africa, Swahili literature, rights, evidence, rhetoric
Organisations: English

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Local EPrints ID: 410280
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/410280
PURE UUID: bab2970d-3635-4892-b483-40827e75076e

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Date deposited: 06 Jun 2017 04:04
Last modified: 15 Mar 2024 13:39

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Contributors

Author: Stephanie Jones
Editor: Kieran Dolin

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