Focusing on the ‘problem’ of pleasure Law, Orientalism and Postcolonialism uncovers the organizing principles by which the legal subject was colonized. That occidental law was complicit in colonial expansion is obvious. What remains to be addressed, however, is the manner in which law and legal discourse sought to colonize individual subjects as subjects of law. It was through the permission of pleasure that modern Western subjects were refined and domesticated. Legally sanctioned outlets for private and social enjoyment instilled and continue to instil within the individual tight self-control over behaviour. There are, however, states of behaviour considered to be repugnant to, and in excess of, modern codes of civility. Drawing on a broad range of literature, (including classical jurisprudence, eighteenth century Orientalist scholarship, early travel literature, and nineteenth century debates surrounding the rule of law), yet concentrating on the experience of British India, the argument here is that such excesses were deemed to be an Oriental phenomenon. Through the encounter with the Orient and with the fantasy of its excess, Piyel Haldar concludes, the relationship between the subject and the law was transformed, and must therefore be re-assessed.

This book explores the ways in which colonial administrators constructed knowledge about the society and culture of India and the processes through which that knowledge has shaped past and present Indian reality.

Essays reveal the central part played by law in constituting the West as the antithesis of various 'others'

This innovative handbook provides a comprehensive, and truly global, overview of the main approaches and themes within law and society scholarship or social-legal studies. A one-volume introduction to academic resources and ideas that are relevant for today’s debates on issues from reproductive justice to climate justice, food security, water conflicts, artificial intelligence, and global financial transactions, this handbook is divided into two sections. The first, ‘Perspectives and Approaches’, accessibly explains a variety of frameworks through which the relationship between law and society is addressed and understood, with emphasis on contemporary perspectives that are relatively new to many socio-legal scholars. Following the book’s overall interest in social justice, the entries in this section of the book show how conceptual tools originate in, and help to illuminate, real-world issues. The second and largest section of the book (42 short well-written pieces) presents reflections on topics or areas concerning law, justice, and society that are inherently interdisciplinary and that are relevance to current – but also classical – struggles around justice. Informing readers about the lineage of ideas that are used or could be used today for research and activism, the book attends to the full range of local, national and transnational issues in law and society. The authors were carefully chosen to achieve a diverse and non-Eurocentric view of socio-legal studies. This volume will be invaluable for law students, those in inter-disciplinary programs such as law and society, justice studies and legal studies, and those with interests in law, but based in other social sciences. It will also appeal to general readers interested in questions of justice and rights, including activists and advocates around the world.

Since the Cold War ended, China has become a global symbol of disregard for human rights, while the United States has positioned itself as the world’s chief exporter of the rule of law. How did lawlessness become an axiom about Chineseness rather than a fact needing to be verified empirically, and how did the United States assume the mantle of law’s universal appeal? In a series of wide-ranging inquiries, Teemu Ruskola investigates the history of “legal Orientalism”: a set of globally circulating narratives about what law is and who has it. For example, why is China said not to have a history of corporate law, as a way of explaining its “failure” to develop capitalism on its own? Ruskola shows how a European tradition of philosophical prejudices about Chinese law developed into a distinctively American ideology of empire, influential to this day. The first Sino-U.S. treaty in 1844 authorized the extraterritorial application of American law in a putatively lawless China. A kind of legal imperialism, this practice long predated U.S. territorial colonialism after the Spanish-American War in 1898, and found its fullest expression in an American district court’s jurisdiction over the “District of China.” With urgent contemporary implications, legal Orientalism lives on in the enduring damage wrought on the U.S. Constitution by late nineteenth-century anti-Chinese immigration laws, and in the self-Orientalizing reforms of Chinese law today. In the global politics of trade and human rights, legal Orientalism continues to shape modern subjectivities, institutions, and geopolitics in powerful and unacknowledged ways.

Postcolonialism offers challenging and provocative ways of thinking about colonial and neocolonial power, about self and other, and about the discourses that perpetuate postcolonial inequality and violence. Much of the seminal work in postcolonialism has been shaped by currents in philosophy, notably Marxism and ethics. "Understanding Postcolonialism" examines the philosophy of postcolonialism in order to reveal the often conflicting systems of thought which underpin it. In so doing, the book presents a reappraisal of the major postcolonial thinkers of the twentieth century.Ranging beyond the narrow selection of theorists to which the field is often restricted, the book explores the work of Fanon and Sartre, Gandhi, Nandy, and the Subaltern Studies Group, Foucault and Said, Derrida and Bhabha, Khatibi and Glissant, and Spivak, Mbembe and Mudimbe. A clear and accessible introduction to the subject, "Understanding Postcolonialism" reveals how, almost half a century after decolonisation, the complex relation between politics and ethics continues to shape postcolonial thought.