Critical Legal Thinking

Steve Biko, I Write What I Like (A Stubbs. ed) (Heinemann 1978) Although she was writing about the black existentialist novelist Ralph Ellison, Hortense Spillers could easily have also been referring to Stephen Bantu Biko when she invokes the figure of a Black thinker who revises “’blackness’ into a critical posture” – “a strategy [and] process of culture critique” – and harnesses it to “a symbolic program of philosophical ‘disobedience’” understood as “systematic scepticism and refusal”.[1] This rendering of Biko and Black Consciousness in philosophical terms allows us to overturn a set of distortions and commodifications that would reduce him to empty catchphrases and quotations; exploit his image on T-shirts; falsely associate him with “post”-apartheid rainbowism; and consign him to a deserted past.  Biko’s search for a liberated…

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Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (The New Press 2010) When I was a wandering recent law graduate, I found myself washed up in the murky bayous of New Orleans, working at an under-resourced, over-stressed Capital defence law firm.  After a few weeks of preparing case work at my desk, I make my first trip to speak to our clients based at Louisiana State Penitentiary, better known by the its ominous name of Angola Prison. The prison is called Angola because it is located on a former slave plantation that was itself called Angola due to many of the slaves were brought from Angola in sub-Saharan Africa. Today, Angola is the largest maximum-security prison in America, with Louisiana holding the highest incarceration…

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Gloria Anzaldúa, ‘The Coming of el Mundo Surdo’ in AnaLouise Keating (ed), The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader (Duke 2009) How can we make sense of a global order that is founded upon the act of making “most of the world”[1] out of place, through the motions of the global economy and those divisions from which it has always fed from, their race, gender, class, ethnicity, culture, country of origin and so on? And, more to the point here, how can we even exist when we become aware of this widespread out of placeness? Queer, chicana, mestiza social theorist, Gloria Anzaldúa’s speaks of the power of Critical Race Theory to conceptualise this state of affairs, while building upon the strength of those differences and dislocations that assumingly…

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Lewis Gordon, Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times (Routledge 2007) I’ve been called ‘Paki’, ‘flaco n*****’, ‘Ethiopian’ or ‘too Latin American’ more times than I care to count. Including during and about my teaching. But CRT is not about who I am or what names I’ve been called. It isn’t about self-victimhood or identity-politics. It’s about agency, position and creative institutional attitudes. In its most influential form, CRT can be traced back not only to 1980s America but also, to the older tradition focusing on institutional creolisation, trans-continentalism and amphibian cultures in the Caribbean and the rest of the Americas. Upon arriving in North Africa to join the anti-fascist struggle, the 18-year-old Martinican writer Frantz Fanon observed: “the French hate the Jew.…

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Kimberlé Crenshaw, ‘Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics.’ University of Chicago Legal Forum (1989) 139; Patricia J. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights. (Harvard 1991). Sometimes our language fails us.  We observe things in daily life—about our social interactions, our institutions, or the ways that laws are written and applied—and when we do not have the language to describe or measure these observations, then we innovate. We develop a vocabulary to express the experiences and patterns that we can substantiate but cannot yet name. This is the very essence of critical thought, and it means the difference between learning and mimicry. Two writers who have been formative in my thinking about…

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Donna Awatere, Māori Sovereignty (Broadsheet 1984) My mother’s people are from Ōpōtiki on the East Cape of Aotearoa and it wasn’t until I was an adult that I came to have some understanding of my Māoritanga, or our people’s history. Our iwi (tribe) Whakatōhea are widely acknowledged to have been among those ravaged the worst by successive colonial and white settler governments. My grandmother was the last of 10 children and carried with her until death a deep sense of shame and anger at her brown skin. I never heard her speak te reo (Māori language), though she must have grown up with it as even her Lebanese father was a fluent speaker.  It was in this context that I came to read Māori…

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James Baldwin, Speech at Berkeley (1979) I call myself a child of this world of empire. The colony I was born in bore recent witness to British district officers who met with one of my grandfathers. My other grandfather was schooled by Scottish missionaries. Colonial anthropologists and sociologists took intrusive photographs of the women of my family. My mother marched at an independence day parade… a parade to mark the removal of the physical signs of empire, while its puppets and economic as well as epistemological machinery remained… like a spectre at the feast, keeping the power in place… out of sight. Out of sight.  As a child, I was told stories of empire by my grandparents and my parents. I was…

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Attia Hosain, Sunlight on a Broken Column (Chatto and Windus 1961)  A few years ago, I was offered the opportunity to participate in a workshop in India to support early career academics with their writing. The workshop was geared towards addressing the countless issues with academic publishing and the ways knowledge production in the “Global South” is treated. One of the main consequences of these problems is that academics based in the “Global South” are hugely underrepresented as authors in academic journals. We are simply not publishing enough of their work and editors need to do more about this. I was excited about the prospect of visiting India because my personal history leads back there. My father was born in Multan in…

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As if this annus horribilis wasn’t horribilis enough in the last few weeks the Conservative government, the depth of whose depravity is impossible to fathom from one day to the next, have commenced a McCarthy-esque censorship initiative that would be comical if it wasn’t a widely recognised harbinger of fascism. These brow-beating heroes of ‘free speech’ dissatisfied only with an edict censoring the teaching of ‘anti-capitalist’ material in schools, announced on 20 October that the Government “stands unequivocally against critical race theory” and that teachers promoting ideas like ‘white privilege’ or “partisan political views such as defunding the police without offering a balanced treatment of opposing views” will be breaking the law. The body of work referred to as ‘critical race theory’ (CRT) emerged around the 1980s and is usually…

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