journal article
LitStream Collection
Home
Forman, Geremy; Kedar, Alexandre (Sandy)
doi: 10.1068/d402pmid: N/A
In this paper we examine the Israeli government's use of law to institutionalize the dispossession of Palestinian Arabs displaced by the 1948 war and trace the legal transformation of their land during the formative years of Israel's land regime (1948–60). This legal transformation facilitated the expropriation and reallocation of formerly Arab land to primarily Jewish hands and was therefore a central component of the legal reordering of space within Israel after 1948. Based on close examination of Israeli legislation, archival documents, Knesset proceedings, and other sources we delineate a 12-year legislative process consisting of four phases, each concluding with the enactment of major legislation. The process was led by senior and second-tier Israeli officials, and the result was the construction of a new Israeli legal geography. The culmination of the process was the integration of appropriated Arab land into the country's new system of Jewish-Israeli ‘national land’ known as ‘Israel Lands’.
doi: 10.1068/d412pmid: N/A
In this paper I explore the relationship between law, history, and reconciliation in the Canadian context. I argue that linear, teleological forms of history are employed by courts to continually reiterate the myth of a legitimate assertion of colonial sovereignty. By doing so, any potential for political transformation that lies in the objective of reconciliation is stunted; political challenges brought in the form of aboriginal rights claims are folded back into the existing political, economic, and juridical structures of the nation-state. I conclude with an examination of how spatializing history in a nonlinear, nonteleological way could open up possibilities for political change and transformation.
doi: 10.1068/d405pmid: N/A
In this paper I sketch some of the practical connections between two kinds of displacement: experiential–material displacement and discursive or metaphorical displacement. I examine these connections in the context of legal struggles over the eviction of families from public housing. The evictions were authorized on the basis of interpretations of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988 (the “One Strike and You're Out” law) which allows public-housing authorities to evict blameless tenants if anyone in their family had been convicted of drug possession. The paper introduces a neologism, “the nomosphere”, and offers suggestions as to its utility for advancing the project of critical legal geography.
doi: 10.1068/d413pmid: N/A
In this paper I analyze questions of displacement and exclusion through the lens of sexual commerce and its regulation. Using three frames of analysis, including a historical reading of the figure of the prostitute in Western law and culture, an analysis of a model exclusionary zoning law, the ‘Prostitution-free Zone Ordinance’, and a reflection upon the changing position of sex workers within heavily mediated contemporary networks of global e-rotic commerce, I argue that the prostitute is an originary figure of exclusion relative to homo sacer, the masculine sacred outlaw, who is an originary figure of displacement. I bracket popular themes of agency, resistance, and performance to interrogate a disturbing reactionary trend: just as important strides have been made in constituting sex workers and performers as rights-bearing legal subjects and workers, we see a reconfiguration of sexual labor through globalization and technology that renders incomprehensible any traditional subject of labor and rights, and a resurgence of legal and regulatory strategies of total exclusion or banishment. I conclude by positing a theory of ‘differential exclusion’ to describe the positioning of similarly situated sex workers relative to constructions of legality. In contrast to the theory of differential inclusion, which argues that groups are organized differentially and hierarchically through the notion of biopower, according to the relative value of their labor at any given historical moment, the theory of differential exclusion focuses on those groups whose labor is disacknowledged entirely, and who are consequently organized relative to categories of criminality and to their exclusion as subjects of labor and biopower. The work emphasizes both the critical importance and the difficulty of conceiving novel discourses and strategies for achieving worker status and human rights for women and men working in all segments of the sex industry.
doi: 10.1068/d348tpmid: N/A
In this paper I examine struggles over space, mobility, and indigenous human geographies that centred on the reducciones (reductions), colonial towns that were created for the purpose of controlling indigenous populations in 16th-century Spanish Peru. Drawing on recent geographical debates about ‘domination’ and ‘resistance’, I question assumptions, encountered in many studies of the reducciones, about the homogeneity and coherence of Spanish concepts of colonial spatial order, and seek to demonstrate that these settlements were located at the centre of complex struggles that went far beyond binary oppositions between Andeans and Spaniards. Rather than emphasising the manner in which the reducciones were implemented by colonial authorities as instruments of spatial and behavioural control, I draw attention to the ambivalence and diversity of Spanish reactions to the reducciones and the ways in which indigenous spatial practices were closely entwined with those of the colonisers. By reinserting the reducciones into the messy matrix of everyday colonial life, I aim to contribute to current efforts to question and dismantle the dualisms upon which colonialism was itself founded.
Showing 1 to 10 of 19 Articles