Law and Disorder in the Postcolony

- Contents
- Review Quotes

1. Law and Disorder in the the Postcolony: An Introduction
John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff
2. The Mute and the Unspeakable: Political Subjectivity, Violent Crime, and "the Sexual Thing" in a South African Mining Community
Rosalind C. Morris
3. "I Came to Sabotage your Reasoning!": Violence and Resignifications of Justice in Brazil
Teresa P. R. Caldeira
4. Death Squads and Democracy in Northeast Brazil
Nancy Scheper-Hughes
5. Some Notes on Disorder in the Indonesian Postcolony
Patricia Spyer
6. Witchcraft and the Limits of the Law: Cameroon and South Africa
Peter Geschiere
7. The Ethics of Illegality in the Chad Basin
Janet Roitman
8. Criminal Obsessions, after Foucault: Postcoloniality, Policing, and the Metaphysics of Disorder
Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff
9. On Politics as a Form of Expenditure
Achille Mbembe
Contributors
Index
“This major collection, with a masterful introduction by the editors, presents new ways to understand how the globalized legal order bears the signs of its colonial heritage while proving a hyperlegal space for new negotiations about order, crime, and justice in many postcolonial societies. It offers a feast of empirical insights that bring the anthropology of legality into the very center of postcolonial studies, places the South African experience in a highly original global perspective, and shows that the relationship between law and legality is both contradictory and generative.”
“This collection deals with an important contemporary issue: the nature of order and disorder in spaces of former colonization. These essays offer provocative insights into the extent of violence and disorder in various situations and the complicated and often ineffectual, performative, and even complicit role played by police and other agents of state order. There are numerous forms of disorder presented here, from more conventional criminality to vigilante justice to state violence. These are rich and fascinating glimpses into a world of disorder that follows its own forms of order.”
Anthropology: Cultural and Social Anthropology | General Anthropology
Asian Studies: Southeast Asia and Australia
You may purchase this title at these fine bookstores. Outside the USA, see our international sales information.