Spatial Justice After Apartheid

Nomos in the Postcolony

Jaco Barnard-Naudé, Julia Chryssostalis, Jaco Barnard-Naudé, Julia Chryssostalis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032288109
• eBook ISBN: 9781351363471
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Discrimination Law
• Index: History

This book considers the question of spatial justice after apartheid from several disciplinary perspectives – jurisprudence, law, literature, architecture, photography and psychoanalysis are just some of the disciplines engaged here. However, the main theoretical device on which the authors comment is the legacy of what in Carl Schmitt's terms is nomos as the spatialised normativity of sociality. Each author considers within the practical and theoretical constraints of their topic, the question of what nomos in its modern configuration may or may not contribute to a thinking of spatial justice after apartheid.

On the whole, the collection forces a confrontation between law's spatiality in a "postcolonial" era, on the one hand, and the traumatic legacy of what Paul Gilroy has called the "colonial nomos", on the other hand. In the course of this confrontation, critical questions of continuation, extension, disruption and rewriting are raised and confronted in novel and innovative ways that both challenge Schmitt's account of nomos and affirm the centrality of the constitutive relation between law and space. The book promises to resituate the trajectory of nomos, while considering critical instances through which the spatial legacy of apartheid might at last be overcome.

This interdisciplinary book will appeal to scholars of critical legal theory, political philosophy, aesthetics and architecture.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• 1 Apartheid remains: Nomos, law and spatiality in post-apartheid South Africa
• 2 Un/mapping Black life: On estranged spatialities, colonial nomos and the ruses of “post”-apartheid
• 3 On the San Dominick: Thinking nomos and postcolonial becoming with Melville, Schmitt and Fanon
• 4 Unlearning, (un)naming, cohabiting
• 5 Inventaris van my bankrotskap as digter/Inventory of my poetic bankruptcy
• 6 The ground beneath our feet: Black feminist geography in South African literature
• 7 (Un)making Annie: Black female subjectivity, the normative (white) suburban South African home and land repossession
• 8 “Space is space”: The nomos of apartheid, “the coloniser who refuses” and uncolonial spatiality in JM Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians
• 9 Queer states: Beyond the nomos of the closet in Tendai Huchu’s The Hairdresser of Harare
• 10 Abstract space: Continuation, infestation and sanitation in the South African Lawscape
• 11 Unequal scenes
• 12 Sense of place, virtual displacement and a nomos beyond apartheid: What value for a rights-based approach?
• 13 Memory Card Sea Power: Photographs by David Southwood
• 14 Rewriting type: Writing nomos otherwise
• Index