Thinking Through Chronotope: Reading and Working with Mariana Valverde’s Chronotopes of Law: Jurisdiction, Scale, and Governance

Professor Mariana Valverde concludes her most recent book, Chronotopes of Law: Jurisdiction, Scale and Governance, with the following: “I look forward to hearing how different types of readers interact with different parts and also different dimensions of this book, as they engage in their own empirical and theoretical work” (181). In the few pages that follow, I take her invitation seriously. I describe what I understand the book’s work to be, sharing my impressions of particular aspects of it. However, Valverde’s monograph, first and foremost, tempts readers to “make with.” It is most productively read as an inspiration, an exhortation, a beguiling to reexamine the operation of the spatiotemporal scales in governance practices and projects of all sorts, and how the mutually making and shaping aspects of space and time simultaneously rely upon and produce different jurisdictional orders and emotional registers. It is a plea for time in space-biased socio-legal studies and for affect in governmentality work that tends to the abstemious (my claims, not hers).

Valverde draws upon Mikhail Bakhtin’s effervescent ideas to develop her framework, while emphasizing that she is proffering neither a theory of governance nor of law. In Chapter 1, she reviews the central concepts from (or associated with) Bakhtin that have shaped her thinking: intertextuality, dialogism, heteroglossia, chronotope, and hybridity. The group of scholars working with Bakhtin’s ideas in relation to things legal is relatively small. Of that group, the overwhelming majority focus on law and literature, law and narrative, or to some extent, language (see Manderson 2012). Valverde opts, instead, to focus our attention on his engaging but underdeveloped notion of the chronotope. In order to help readers grasp the elusive concepts better, she briefly discusses the court (of law) and the single-family detached dwelling as sites of governance, drawing out, in particular, the complex play of space-time.

Chapter 2 situates the analysis in a number of scholarly conversations, gently rebuking certain fields for their respective spatial or temporal biases, and finding allies in the few scholars working on space-time.¹ I would have welcomed a brief discussion of other possible conversations which I see strongly implied in the book; scholars in communication studies and cultural studies, in particular, would benefit from reading Valverde’s text.² In Chapter 3, Valverde develops her framework in more detail, before putting it into action in Chapters 4, 5, and 6.

Valverde’s central claim in Chapter 4 is that legal feminist thought in the last twenty years can be productively read, in part, as a shift in scale. The attention of feminist politics and theory has turned from domestic questions of unpaid household labour or the constraints of the marriage contract, strategically tackled through domestic law activism, to concerns with transnational flows, networks, and assemblages and a turn to the international and transnational legal context. I found this chapter fascinating and immediately recommended it to a feminist friend in literary studies who was exploring her hesitations with the wholesale rejection of the second wave feminist political agenda, at the same time that she agreed with many of the reasons for that rejection. Understanding feminist theory’s move away from subjectivity as it is lived at the domestic level of the social as a change in ontological scale is tantalizing, and Valverde’s personal involvement in these debates enriches the analysis at every turn.³ I know this chapter will spark lively and spirited debate when we take it up as our next text in the feminist legal studies reading group to which I belong.

Chapter 5 is a powerful, creative analysis of the legal discourse of the “honour of the Crown,” and it is this chapter that, for this reader, best illustrates both the utility of the chronotope as an analytic model and the nuance of Valverde’s framework. With sparkling writing and sharp analysis, Valverde rereads a series of Canadian Supreme Court cases addressing Aboriginal legal issues—Haida Nation, Marshall and Manitoba Metis Federation—illustrating the complex ways in which the mystical figure...