The Place of Law (review)

The examination of borders, boundaries, place, and space has permeated academia—especially the fields of literary and performance studies. Such in fluential works as Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera (Aunt Lute Books, 1999); Una Chaudhuri's Staging Place (University of Michigan, 1995); and Guillermo Gómez-Peña's The New World Border (City Lights, 1996), to name just a few, have already created a solid body of scholarship, critically aligned with postcolonialism, translation studies, and theories of performance. At the very heart of the scholarship of place and borders is the examination of identity and its formation, re-creation, and subsequent points of resistance within a complex network of social, political, economic, and geographic institutions and technologies. Much of the work done so far has examined borders that "divide" two cultures: showing how borders have been oppressive, but also places where new possibilities and hybrid identities emerge. What has been largely missing in this conversation has been a major analysis of how law and space converge. In this collection of essays, the scholars "help us see the way law both defines territory and attempts to keep things in place" (8). The Place of Law adds an entirely new perspective on place and borders by thoroughly examining issues of territory, jurisdiction, and boundary. Though featuring a wide variety of essays, all of the essays in The Place of Law call into question the "contemporary processes of globalization" by investigating the addition and loss of "alliances within and beyond national borders" (5).

The book begins with an essay of particular interest to literary scholars. Wai Chee Dimock's "Time against Territoriality: National Laws and Literary Translations" offers a profound analysis of literature's ability, even within stringent national and juridical borders, to create "time warps," that "[disturb] the official now" (27). Writing about the twice-arrested, Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, Dimock shows how, in the face of a Soviet criminal law that "was in flexibly bound by the borders of the nation," Mandelstam's works operated outside of Soviet jurisdiction (23). By invoking a "literary culture" made up of "an entire population who reads [. . .] spread across countries and centuries" (27), Dimock posits that "there is an ontological mismatch between literary culture and territorial sovereignty, between the deep time of a linguistic continuum and the finite borders of geopolitics" (31). Literary culture, then, is responsible for nonbiological reproductions (of retellings and meanings) that transcend national borders: "Nonbiological reproduction creates a life-form that the nation-state cannot destroy. It turns a seemingly bounded text into something far more random, scattered by circumstances across the length and width of the globe" (32). These nonbiological reproductions occur to create a "ruptured chronology" (32). Whereas territorial sovereignty functions by invoking a here and a now, literature functions by collapsing space and time, by bringing thousands of years and miles together into one literary work. Although this essay discusses the geopolitical structure of the Soviet Union and how it enacted, or failed to enact, its power on its subjects, Dimock's essay is also a tool for navigating the "new legal order" in this present era of globalization (26). Dimock, hopes for a "jurisdiction without sovereignty," a model fully performed by literature, its readers and translations: "Its jurisdiction cuts across the static lines of the geopolitical map, even as it cuts across the segmented planes of national chronology" (26).

The remaining essays offer an impressive array of lenses through which to view the study of place and law. Annelise Riles investigates legal formalism in colonial and postcolonial Fiji in her essay, "The Empty Place: Legal Formalities and the Cultural State." Looking at Fijian "half-castes" or "part-Europeans," Riles illustrates how the Fijian land title registration system created spaces where previously oppressed individuals could live somewhat outside of the culture that oppressed them: "By taking on the form of possessive individualism, in other words, part Europeans were...