Envisioning
legality: law, culture and representation
Timothy D. Peters and Karen Crawley (eds.)
Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group,
2018, 259 pp. * 25 ills
ISBN: 9780367232566
This book addresses 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
Introduction
‘Representational legality’ /
Karen Crawley and Timothy D. Peters
Part I. Spectacles of law and justice
I, archive : envisioning and programming digital legality from Syfy’s Caprica /
Kieran Tranter
Don’t blink : monstrous justice and the weeping angels of Doctor Who / Penny
Crofts
‘Seeing’ justice done : envisioning legality in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark
Knight trilogy / Timothy D. Peters
Machiavellian fantasy and the game of laws : rex, sex and lex in George R.R.
Martin’s A song of ice and fire / William P. MacNeil
Part II. Juridical spectators
Ambivalence and the spectatorship of violence : viewing Inglourious basterds /
Alison Young
Trench, trail, screen : scenes from the scopic regime of sovereignty / Desmond
Manderson
The confessor : Oprah Winfrey, James Frey and the logic of confession / Karen Crawley
and Desmond Manderson
Part III. Scenes of legality
Legal unconsciousness : tragedy and melodrama in the wake of terror / Bonnie
Honig
Mephistopheles in Hamsterdam : carnival and the state of exception in HBO’s The
wire / Edwin Bikundo
Intercultural cinema and the (re)envisioning of law : exploring life, death and
law in Atanarjuat and Before tomorrow / Rebecca Johnson.
Timothy D.
Petersis a Senior Lecturer at USC Law School, University of the Sunshine Coast,
Queensland, Australia.
Karen Crawleyis a Lecturer
at Griffith Law School, Griffith University, Queensland, Australia
