Postcolonial studies has always been invested in questions of justice, and the field has produced a robust history of European colonialism’s establishment through legal measures. From the doctrine of terra nullius[1] to chattel slavery’s legal enshrining,[2] from the rule of law[3] to “the jurisprudence of emergency,”[4] colonial governments imposed legal systems to build and maintain power. Recent scholarship has revealed the intricate relationships between colonial and postcolonial law and literature, variously addressing human rights in world fiction,[5] censorship in apartheid South Africa,[6] and sedition in nineteenth-century British and Indian public spheres.[7] Yet, in law and the humanities more broadly, the postcolonial framework has been largely overlooked, including at prior MLA conventions.

This panel makes a claim for postcolonial studies’ centrality to the field of law and literature, which has been experiencing something of a resurgence over the last decade. Assessing both recent innovations and future directions, “Doing Justice: Law and Postcolonial Studies” assembles varied literary texts, geographic regions, and legal contexts to prompt generative conversation about method, subject, and reach. Collectively, the assembled papers address diverse legal areas, primarily intellectual property law, civil law, and land law; locations, including Guantánamo; Israel-Palestine, and Colombia; and approaches, namely comparative legal and literary studies, narrative studies, and political theory.

Kalyan Nadiminti’s talk, “The Detainee’s Two Bodies: Intellectual Property and Postcolonial Citizenship at Guantánamo Bay,” argues that in refusing detainees ownership rights over their creative production, the U.S. undermines its extraterritorial jurisdictional claims. Examining paintings by current and former detainees alongside Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s redacted memoir Guantánamo Diary (2015/2017), Nadiminti asks: How do we analyze post-9/11 art in captivity when counsel confirms that detainees maintain intellectual property rights under international law? By claiming ownership, the U.S. military state places the exceptional space of extralegal prisons on a continuum with its expanding global prison network and the spectral space of the plantation. The triangulation of intellectual property, artistic production, and military protocol produces two distinct detainee bodies: the material, deterritorialized body shackled in indefinite detention and the postcolonial metaphorical body demanding public circulation.

Carolyn Ownbey’s presentation, “Civic Narration: Writing & Reading Israel/Palestine,” shifts our focus from extraterritoriality to the moment of nation-state creation, asking: How do new states conceive their population, their citizenry, their insiders and outsiders? Ownbey argues that Anton Shammas’ 1986 novel Arabesques, written and narrated by a Christian-Palestinian-Arab-Israeli, reimagines borders by modeling what she terms civic narration. Formally playing upon its quasi-memoir genre, Shammas’s novel contains multiple protagonists, storylines, and narrators. Arabesques’ shifting registers of narration, each reflective of a given narrator’s civic status, contribute to its narrative unevenness and register competing claims over who has the right to represent whom. In short, Arabesques explores how literary forms—the novel, autobiography, and/or arabesque—intersect with legal forms in Israel/Palestine.

In our third paper, Lenin Lozano Guzmán addresses postcolonial exclusion caused not by civil law but land law. In “Cycles of Dispossession: History and Law in Daniel Ferreira’s Rebelión de los oficios inútiles,” Lozano offers a new angle on the Colombian Armed Conflict, arguing that its violence stemmed significantly from mid-nineteenth century postcolonial constitutionalism and early twentieth century capitalist land law. Lozano shows how Ferreira’s 2014 novel juxtaposes the contemporaneous state of siege, decreed in the late-1960s and following the Constitution, with the state’s dispossessing peasants of land in the early 1900s. Drawing on Lukács’s assessment of the realist novel and Quijano’s concept of the coloniality of power, Lozano concludes that Ferreira’s novel theorizes land laws as contradictory: at once a legitimate right for workers and a tool that strengthens the oligarchy and Colombian Army.

Finally, respondent Leila Neti identifies these papers’ overlapping questions, connecting them to recent innovations in postcolonial law and literary studies. Neti’s influential 2021 monograph, Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination, argues that judicial opinions and nineteenth-century novels together produce notions of self and sovereignty. By synthesizing panelists’ claims, Neti establishes the grounds for a generative, twenty-minute Q&A.

[1] Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (2015).

[2] Naimou, Salvage Work: U.S. and Caribbean Literatures Among the Debris of Legal Personhood (2015).

[3] McBride, Mr. Mothercountry: The Man Who Made the Rule of Law (2016).

[4] Hussain, The Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonialism and the Rule of Law (2003).

[5] Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (2007); Anker, Fictions of Dignity: Embodying Human Rights in World Literature (2012).

[6] McDonald, The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and its Cultural Consequences (2009).

[7] Agathocleous, Disaffected: Emotion, Sedition, and Colonial Law in the Anglosphere (2021).