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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Singing the Law: Oral Jurisprudence and the Crisis of Colonial Modernity in East African Literature

Singing the Law: Oral Jurisprudence and the Crisis of Colonial Modernity in East African Literature

Leman, Peter

Hardcover

Series: Postcolonialism Across the Disciplines, Book 24

African HistoryLiterary Criticism

ISBN10: 1789621135
ISBN13: 9781789621136
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Published: Apr 18 2020
Pages: 232
Weight: 1.11
Height: 0.56 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English

Singing the Law is about the legal lives and afterlives of oral cultures in East Africa, particularly as they appear within the pages of written literatures during the colonial and postcolonial periods. In examining these cultures, this book begins with an analysis of the cultural narratives of time and modernity that formed the foundations of British colonial law. Recognizing the contradictory nature of these narratives (i.e., both promoting and retreating from the Euro-centric ideal of temporal progress) enables us to make sense of the many representations of and experiments with non-linear, open-ended, and otherwise experimental temporalities that we find in works of East African literature that take colonial law as a subject or point of critique. Many of these works, furthermore, consciously appropriate orature as an expressive form with legal authority. This affords them the capacity to challenge the narrative foundations of colonial law and its postcolonial residues and offer alternative models of temporality and modernity that give rise, in turn, to alternative forms of legality. East Africa's oral jurisprudence ultimately has implications not only for our understanding of law and literature in colonial and postcolonial contexts, but more broadly for our understanding of how the global south has shaped modern law as we know and experience it today.

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