Spatial Justice After Apartheid: Nomos in the Postcolony

This book considers the question of spatial justice after apartheid from several disciplinary perspectives - jurisprudence, law, literature, architecture, photography and psychoanalysis are just some of the disciplines engaged here. However, the main theoretical device on which the authors comment is the legacy of what in Carl Schmitt’s terms is nomos as the spatialised normativity of sociality. Each author considers within the practical and theoretical constraints of their topic, the question of what nomos in its modern configuration may or may not contribute to a thinking of spatial justice after apartheid.

On the whole, the collection forces a confrontation between law’s spatiality in a ＂postcolonial＂ era, on the one hand, and the traumatic legacy of what Paul Gilroy has called the ＂colonial nomos＂, on the other hand. In the course of this confrontation, critical questions of continuation, extension, disruption and rewriting are raised and confronted in novel and innovative ways that both challenge Schmitt’s account of nomos and affirm the centrality of the constitutive relation between law and space. The book promises to resituate the trajectory of nomos, while considering critical instances through which the spatial legacy of apartheid might at last be overcome.

This interdisciplinary book will appeal to scholars of critical legal theory, political philosophy, aesthetics and architecture.

Jaco Barnard-Naudé is Professor of Jurisprudence and Co-Director of the Centre for Rhetoric Studies (CRhS) at the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) Law Faculty, South Africa. From 2020 to 2021, he was a Research Professor in the Free State Centre for Human Rights at the University of the Free State, South Africa. He is a past recipient of the UCT Fellows’ Award and was the British Academy’s Newton Advanced Fellow in the Westminster Law and Theory Lab at the University of Westminster Law School, UK, from 2017 to 2020. Jaco holds a B2-rating from the South African National Research Foundation (NRF) and is also a past Honorary Research Fellow of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK. He publishes widely in the fields of Jurisprudence, Law and Literature, Spatial Justice, Queer Legal Theory, Contractual Justice after Apartheid and Transitional Post-Apartheid Justice.

Julia Chryssostalis is Principal Lecturer and Co-Director of the Westminster Law and Theory Lab at the University of Westminster Law School, UK. She became an academic after practising law as a lawyer in Athens, Greece, while chairing the Human Rights Education Committee of the Greek Section of Amnesty International. She has held Visiting Fellowships at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, Princeton University, USA and University of Cape Town, South Africa. Her current work is in the interface of critical legal theory and law and humanities exploring the different names and figures of nomos.