Genre, Genealogy, and Acts of Constitution

As the field of law and literature rapidly grows to include questions of colonialism, anticolonialism, and postcolonialism, we are still learning what methodological innovations might be required to do justice to these questions, not to mention what impact such innovations might have on the field of law and literature as a whole. Where many dominant concepts of law and legality take for granted a social setting where law is represented by established liberal-democratic institutions, the setting of the colony (which expands into neo-, anti-, and post-colonial sites) puts pressure on this imaginary basis of the law. The colony and its residues expose an irreducibly anti-social element in the history of liberal-democratic law, something designed not to foster a just society but to inhibit one from taking shape. In postcolonial countries where capitalist exploitation has reasserted itself through the techniques of neocolonialism―which is to say all of them―this colonialist feature survives, leading to ongoing legal dysfunction. One way to begin remedying such dysfunction is to strip the law down to the generic and literary forms that render its authority legible; Anne Gulick's Literature, Law, and Rhetorical Performance in the Anticolonial Atlantic (2016) undertakes just such a project.

This critique of law raises other questions about the role literature might play in the constitution of legal communities. How might literature supplement the cultural archive from which our legal concepts are theorized? What public roles become imaginable for literature? Does the normative world of literature have any connection to the normative world of the law? Should it? How are we to understand concrete modes of translation between literary and legal-institutional forms? Gulick offers a richly elaborated methodological vision for reading law and literature together, analyzing both in terms of the speech acts they instantiate. By grounding her methodology in rhetorical gestures, particularly that of the declaration, Gulick is able to synthesize a great number of diverse textual artifacts, including law, literature, history, criticism, and theory. Even more essentially, however, she focuses on the rhetorical acts, problems, and attempted solutions that anticolonial writers―both legal and literary―have undertaken as they seek to bring postcolonial communities into being.

Following in the footsteps of Joseph R. Slaughter's Human Rights, Inc. (2007) and Elizabeth S. Anker's Fictions of Dignity (2012), Gulick's book is interested in how human rights discourse is loaded with Eurocentric narrative conventions, which in turn carry fatal consequences for its actualization in the world at large.¹ Like her predecessors, she looks to literature for alternative ways of grounding legal authority. Gulick's unique approach, however, is to focus on a particular historical trajectory, that of the "Anticolonial Atlantic" (a revision of Paul Gilroy's "Black Atlantic"), from revolutionary Haiti to the era of African and Caribbean decolonization to the language politics of the 1980s and 1990s. Across this vast historical sweep, Gulick traces a genealogy of anticolonial rhetorical genres that attempt to bring new legal authorities into being. Working across numerous disciplines and genres, she is able to rigorously frame each text within evolving discourses of rights, subjects, and "the people." In response to the supposition of a priori natural rights (and later universal human rights) that pervades Eurocentric legal discourse, she argues, the anticolonial writing of the Atlantic world has always tried to ground legal authority, and normative authority more broadly, within the performative context of its enunciation.

Central to the connective tissue of this book is the rhetorical gesture of the declaration. The various texts that Gulick studies are political, legal, literary, critical, and theoretical, but they all are united in their experimentation with the declaration as a way of invoking revolutionary authority in the name of a community yet to come. At the heart of this gesture, as Jacques Derrida and Hannah Arendt have argued, is a gap between the individuals actually drafting the declaration and the representative authority they claim in order to do so―which, since the age...