Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Envisioning Legality: Law, Culture and Representation is a path-breaking collection of some of the world s leading cultural legal scholars addressing issues of law, representation and the image. Law is constituted in and through the representations that hold us in their thrall, and this book focuses on the ways in which cultural legal representations not only reflect or contribute to an understanding of law, but constitute the very fabric of legality itself. As such, each of these readings of cultural texts takes seriously the cultural as a mode of envisioning, constituting and critiquing the law. And the theoretically sophisticated approaches utilised here encompass more than simply an engagement with harmless entertainment . Rather they enact and undertake specific political and critical engagements with timely issues, such as: the redressing of past wrongs, recognising and combatting structural injustices, and orienting our political communities in relation to uncertain futures. Envisioning Legality thereby presents a cultural legal studies that provides the means for engaging in robust, sustained and in-depth encounters with the nature and role of law in a global, mediated world.
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Synopsis
Envisioning Legality: Law, Culture and Representation brings together leading scholars working at the intersection of law, representation, and visual culture. Its wager is that the cultural representations which hold us in their thrall - from Game of Thrones to The Dark Knight, The Oprah Winfrey Show to The Wire, war photography to Inuit cinema - not only represent law, but constitute the ocular and spectacular fabric of legality itself. The essays in this volume explore the economies of looking, questions of genre that determine audience response, the affective perspective of the spectator, and their psychic investments, as modes of representational legality in which law is performed or enforced, and legal subjects affectively constituted. In so doing they shed new light on key concerns of critical legal scholarship, including law's capacity to redress past wrongs, recognise and combat injustices, and orient our communities in relation to uncertain futures. Envisioning Legality thereby presents a Cultural Legal Studies that provides the means for envisioning and reimagining law, legality and justice in a global, mediated world.