Envisioning Legality: Law, Culture and Representation

Description

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. Cover Title Copyright Contents List of figures List of contributors Acknowledgements 1 Introduction: ‘representational legality’ Part I Spectacles of law and justice 2 I, archive: envisioning and programming digital legality from Syfy’s Caprica 3 Don’t blink: monstrous justice and the Weeping Angels of Doctor Who 4 ‘Seeing’ justice done: envisioning legality in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Trilogy 5 Machiavellian fantasy and the game of laws: rex, sex and lex in George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire Part II Juridical spectators 6 Ambivalence and the spectatorship of violence: viewing Inglourious Basterds 7 Trench, trail, screen: scenes from the scopic regime of sovereignty 8 The confessor: Oprah Winfrey, James Frey and the logic of confession Part III Scenes of legality 9 Legal unconsciousness: tragedy and melodrama in the wake of terror 10 Mephistopheles in Hamsterdam: carnival and the state of exception in HBO’s The Wire 11 Intercultural cinema and the (re)envisioning of law: exploring life, death and law in Atanarjuat and Before Tomorrow Index