Law as performance
Austin
Sarat, Lawrence Douglas, Martha Merrill Umphrey (eds.)
Amherst: University
of Massachusetts Press, 2018, ix, 250 pp. : ill.
ISBN: 9781625343543
In considering law through the lens of
performance studies, the contributors in this volume emphasize the embodied,
affective, and reiterative qualities that move law off the printed page and
into the thick world of lived experience. They consider the blurring of lines
between performance and the enactment of law, the transformative exchanges
between the law and its many and varied stagings, and the impact or resonance of performativity in situations
where innocence and guilt may be determined.
Introduction
: law and/as performance / Martha Merrill Umphrey, Austin Sarat, and Lawrence
Douglas
Penitentiary
performances : spectators, affecting scenes, and terrible apparitions in the
nineteenth-century model prison / Julie Stone Peters
«This
is a trial, not a performance!»: staging the time of the law / Ryan
Hartigan
Reenactability
/ Ann Pellegrini and Karen Shimakawa
Statements
before and after arrests : performing at Law’s Edge in Apartheid South Africa /
Catherine M. Cole
Freedom
with silence : cryptoanalytics and the differend in the afterlives of legal
things / Lara D. Nielsen
Twelve
notes on Ferguson : black performance and police power / Joshua Chambers-Letson
