The Courtroom as a Space of Resistance

Reflections on the Legacy of the Rivonia Trial

Awol Allo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Law
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317037118
• Subtopic: Jurisprudence
• Index: Law

Fifty years before his death in 2013, Nelson Mandela stood before Justice de Wet in Pretoria's Palace of Justice and delivered one of the most spectacular and liberating statements ever made from a dock. In what came to be regarded as "the trial that changed South Africa", Mandela summed up the spirit of the liberation struggle and the moral basis for the post-Apartheid society. In this blistering critique of Apartheid and its perversion of justice, Mandela transforms the law into a sword and shield. He invokes it while undermining it, uses it while subverting it, and claims it while defeating it. Wise and strategic, Mandela skilfully reimagines the courtroom as a site of visibility and hearing, opening up a political space within the legal. This volume returns to the Rivonia courtroom to engage with Mandela's masterful performance of resistance and the dramatic core of that transformative event. Cutting across a wide-range of critical theories and discourses, contributors reflect on the personal, spatial, temporal, performative, and literary dimensions of that constitutive event. By redefining the spaces, institutions and discourses of law, contributors present a fresh perspective that re-sets the margins of what can be thought and said in the courtroom.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The Courtroom as a Space of Resistance: Reflections on the Legacy of the Rivonia Trial
• 2 In the Name of Mandela
• 3 When Time Gives: Reflections on Two Rivonia Renegades
• 4 Nelson Mandela and Civic Myths: A Law and Literature Approach to Rivonia
• 5 Justice in Transition: South Africa Political Trials, 1956–1964
• 6 The Rivonia Trial: Domination, Resistance and Transformation
• 7 ‘The Road to Freedom Passes Through Gaol’: The Treason Trial and Rivonia Trial as Political Trials
• 8 ‘I am the first accused’: Seven Reflections (and a Postscript) on Derrida’s Mandela
• 9 ‘Black man in the white man’s court’: Performative Genealogies in the Courtroom
• 10 Reading Choreographies of Black Resistance: Courtroom Performance as/and Critique
• 11 What is Revealed by the Absence of a Reply? Courtesy, Pedagogy and the Spectre of Unanswered Letters in Mandela’s Trial
• 12 Lawscapes: The Rivonia Trial and Pretoria
• 13 Literary Autonomy on Trial: The 1974 Cape Trial of André Brink’s Kennis van die Aand
• 14 “The Unkindest Cut of All”: Coloniality, Performance and Gender in the Courtroom and Beyond
• 15 Spectacular Justice: Aesthetics and Power in the Gandhi Murder Trial
• Index