Cultural Studies and the 'Juridical Turn'

Cultural Studies and the 'Juridical Turn' PDF Author: Jaafar Aksikas
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317244796
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 472

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Book Description
The relationship between culture and the law has become an emergent concern within contemporary Cultural Studies as a field, but the recent focus has been largely limited to the role played by cultural representations and identity politics in the legitimation of legal discourse and policies. While continuing this emphasis, this collection also looks at the law itself as a cultural production, tracing some of the specific contours of its function in the last three decades. It argues that, with the onset of neoliberal or late capitalism, the law has taken on a new specificity and power, leading to what we are calling the ‘juridical turn’, where the presumed legitimacy of the law makes other forms of hegemonic struggle secondary. The collection not only charts the law and cultural policy as they exert their powerful—if often overlooked—influence on every aspect of society and culture, but it also seeks to define this important field of study and demonstrate the substantial role law plays in the production of our social and cultural worlds. In this trailblazing collection of contributions by leading and emerging figures in the field of cultural legal studies, chapters examine various ways in which this process is manifested, such as U.S. legislation and Supreme Court Decisions on gay marriage, immigration, consumer finance, welfare, copyright, and so-called victim’s rights, along with international comparisons from Europe and Latin America. It promises to be a pathbreaking analysis of our juridically-determined conjuncture. This book was originally published as a special issue of Cultural Studies.

Cultural Studies and the 'Juridical Turn'

Cultural Studies and the 'Juridical Turn' PDF Author: Jaafar Aksikas
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317244796
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 472

Get Book Here

Book Description
The relationship between culture and the law has become an emergent concern within contemporary Cultural Studies as a field, but the recent focus has been largely limited to the role played by cultural representations and identity politics in the legitimation of legal discourse and policies. While continuing this emphasis, this collection also looks at the law itself as a cultural production, tracing some of the specific contours of its function in the last three decades. It argues that, with the onset of neoliberal or late capitalism, the law has taken on a new specificity and power, leading to what we are calling the ‘juridical turn’, where the presumed legitimacy of the law makes other forms of hegemonic struggle secondary. The collection not only charts the law and cultural policy as they exert their powerful—if often overlooked—influence on every aspect of society and culture, but it also seeks to define this important field of study and demonstrate the substantial role law plays in the production of our social and cultural worlds. In this trailblazing collection of contributions by leading and emerging figures in the field of cultural legal studies, chapters examine various ways in which this process is manifested, such as U.S. legislation and Supreme Court Decisions on gay marriage, immigration, consumer finance, welfare, copyright, and so-called victim’s rights, along with international comparisons from Europe and Latin America. It promises to be a pathbreaking analysis of our juridically-determined conjuncture. This book was originally published as a special issue of Cultural Studies.

Cultural Legal Studies

Cultural Legal Studies PDF Author: Cassandra Sharp
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317626257
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 458

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Book Description
What can law’s popular cultures do for law, as a constitutive and interrogative critical practice? This collection explores such a question through the lens of the ‘cultural legal studies’ movement, which proffers a new encounter with the ‘cultural turn’ in law and legal theory. Moving beyond the ‘law ands’ (literature, humanities, culture, film, visual and aesthetics) on which it is based, this book demonstrates how the techniques and practices of cultural legal studies can be used to metamorphose law and the legalities that underpin its popular imaginary. By drawing on three different modes of cultural legal studies – storytelling, technology and jurisprudence – the collection showcases the intersectional practices of cultural legal studies, and law in its popular cultural mode. The contributors to the collection deploy differentiated modes of cultural legal studies practice, adopting diverse philosophical, disciplinary, methodological and theoretical approaches and subjects of examination. The collection draws on this mix of diversity and homogeneity to thread together its overarching theme: that we must take seriously an interrogation of law as culture and in its cultural form. That is, it does not ask how a text ‘represents’ law; but rather how the representational nature of both law and culture intersect so that the ‘juridical’ become visible in various cultural manifestations. In short, it asks: how law’s popular cultures actively effect the metamorphosis of law.

Cultural Analysis, Cultural Studies, and the Law

Cultural Analysis, Cultural Studies, and the Law PDF Author: Austin D. Sarat
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822384752
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
Cultural Analysis, Cultural Studies, and the Law is a field-defining collection of work at the intersection of law, cultural analysis and cultural studies. Over the past few decades the marked turn toward claims and policy arguments based on cultural identity—such as ethnicity, race, or religion—has pointed up the urgent need for legal studies to engage cultural critiques. Exploration of legal issues through cultural analyses provides a rich supplement to other approaches—including legal realism, law and economics, and law and society. As Austin Sarat and Jonathan Simon demonstrate, scholars of the law have begun to mine the humanities for new theoretical tools and kinds of knowledge. Crucial to this effort is cultural studies, with its central focus on the relationship between knowledge and power. Drawing on legal scholarship, literary criticism, psychoanalytic theory, and anthropology, the essays collected here exemplify the contributions cultural analysis and cultural studies make to interdisciplinary legal study. Some of these broad-ranging pieces describe particular approaches to the cultural study of the law, while others look at specific moments where the law and culture intersect. Contributors confront the deep connections between law, social science, and post-World War II American liberalism; examine the traffic between legal and late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century scientific discourses; and investigate, through a focus on recovered memory, the ways psychotherapy is absorbed into the law. The essayists also explore specific moments where the law is forced to comprehend the world beyond its boundaries, illuminating its dependence on a series of unacknowledged aesthetic, psychological, and cultural assumptions—as in Aldolph Eichmann’s 1957 trial, hiv-related cases, and the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent efforts to define the role of race in the construction of constitutionally adequate voting districts. Contributors. Paul Berman, Peter Brooks, Wai Chee Dimock, Anthony Farley, Shoshanna Felman, Carol Greenhouse, Paul Kahn, Naomi Mezey, Tobey Miller, Austin Sarat, Jonathan Simon, Alison Young

The Pragmatic Turn in Law

The Pragmatic Turn in Law PDF Author: Janet Giltrow
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501504681
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
In legal interpretation, where does meaning come from? Law is made from language, yet law, unlike other language-related disciplines, has not so far experienced its "pragmatic turn" towards inference and the construction of meaning. This book investigates to what extent a pragmatically based view of l linguistic and legal interpretation can lead to new theoretical views for law and, in addition, to practical consequences in legal decision-making. With its traditional emphasis on the letter of the law and the immutable stability of a text as legal foundation, law has been slow to take the pragmatic perspective: namely, the language-user 's experience and activity in making meaning. More accustomed to literal than to pragmatic notions of meaning, that is, in the text rather than constructed by speakers and hearers the disciplines of law may be culturally resistant to the pragmatic turn. By bringing together the different but complementary perspectives of pragmaticians and lawyers, this book addresses the issue of to what extent legal meaning can be productively analysed as deriving from resources beyond the text, beyond the letter of the law. This collection re-visits the feasibility of the notion of literal meaning for legal interpretation and, at the same time, the feasibility of pragmatic meaning for law. Can explications of pragmatic meaning support court actions in the same way concepts of literal meaning have traditionally supported statutory interpretations and court judgements? What are the consequences of a user-based view of language for the law, in both its practices of interpretation and its definition of itself as a field? Readers will find in this collection means of approaching such questions, and promising routes for inquiry into the genre- and field-specific characteristics of inference in law. In many respects, the problem of literal vs. pragmatic meaning confined to the text vs. reaching beyond it will appear to parallel the dichotomy in law between textualism and intentionalism. There are indeed illuminating connections between the pair of linguistic terms and the more publicly controversial legal ones. But the parallel is not exact, and the linguistic dichotomy is in any case anterior to the legal one. Even as linguistic-pragmatic investigation may serve legal domains, the legal questions themselves point back to central conditions of all linguistic meaning.

The Cultural Return

The Cultural Return PDF Author: Susan Hegeman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520951824
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 171

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Book Description
This insightful book tracks the concept of culture across a range of scholarly disciplines and much of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—years that saw the emergence of new fields and subfields (cultural studies, the new cultural history, literary new historicism, as well as ethnic and minority studies) and came to be called "the cultural turn." Since the 1990s, however, the idea of culture has fallen out of scholarly favor. Susan Hegeman engages with a diversity of disciplines, including anthropology, literary studies, sociology, philosophy, psychology, and political science, to historicize the rise and fall of the cultural turn and to propose ways that culture may still be a vital concept in the global present.

The Cultural Politics of U.S. Immigration

The Cultural Politics of U.S. Immigration PDF Author: Leah Perry
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479880795
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
How the immigration policies and popular culture of the 1980's fused to shape modern views on democracy In the 1980s, amid increasing immigration from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia, the circle of who was considered American seemed to broaden, reflecting the democratic gains made by racial minorities and women. Although this expanded circle was increasingly visible in the daily lives of Americans through TV shows, films, and popular news media, these gains were circumscribed by the discourse that certain immigrants, for instance single and working mothers, were feared, censured, or welcomed exclusively as laborers. In The Cultural Politics of U.S. Immigration, Leah Perry argues that 1980s immigration discourse in law and popular media was a crucial ingredient in the cohesion of the neoliberal idea of democracy. Blending critical legal analysis with a feminist media studies methodology over a range of sources, including legal documents, congressional debates, and popular media, such as Golden Girls, Who’s the Boss?, Scarface, and Mi Vida Loca, Perry shows how even while “multicultural” immigrants were embraced, they were at the same time disciplined through gendered discourses of respectability. Examining the relationship between law and culture, this book weaves questions of legal status and gender into existing discussions about race and ethnicity to revise our understanding of both neoliberalism and immigration.

A Companion to Critical and Cultural Theory

A Companion to Critical and Cultural Theory PDF Author: Imre Szeman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118472306
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 608

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Book Description
This Companion addresses the contemporary transformation of critical and cultural theory, with special emphasis on the way debates in the field have changed in recent decades. Features original essays from an international team of cultural theorists which offer fresh and compelling perspectives and sketch out exciting new areas of theoretical inquiry Thoughtfully organized into two sections – lineages and problematics – that facilitate its use both by students new to the field and advanced scholars and researchers Explains key schools and movements clearly and succinctly, situating them in relation to broader developments in culture, society, and politics Tackles issues that have shaped and energized the field since the Second World War, with discussion of familiar and under-theorized topics related to living and laboring, being and knowing, and agency and belonging

A Companion to Literary Theory

A Companion to Literary Theory PDF Author: David H. Richter
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118958756
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 606

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Book Description
Introduces readers to the modes of literary and cultural study of the previous half century A Companion to Literary Theory is a collection of 36 original essays, all by noted scholars in their field, designed to introduce the modes and ideas of contemporary literary and cultural theory. Arranged by topic rather than chronology, in order to highlight the relationships between earlier and most recent theoretical developments, the book groups its chapters into seven convenient sections: I. Literary Form: Narrative and Poetry; II. The Task of Reading; III. Literary Locations and Cultural Studies; IV. The Politics of Literature; V. Identities; VI. Bodies and Their Minds; and VII. Scientific Inflections. Allotting proper space to all areas of theory most relevant today, this comprehensive volume features three dozen masterfully written chapters covering such subjects as: Anglo-American New Criticism; Chicago Formalism; Russian Formalism; Derrida and Deconstruction; Empathy/Affect Studies; Foucault and Poststructuralism; Marx and Marxist Literary Theory; Postcolonial Studies; Ethnic Studies; Gender Theory; Freudian Psychoanalytic Criticism; Cognitive Literary Theory; Evolutionary Literary Theory; Cybernetics and Posthumanism; and much more. Features 36 essays by noted scholars in the field Fills a growing need for companion books that can guide readers through the thicket of ideas, systems, and terminologies Presents important contemporary literary theory while examining those of the past The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Literary Theory will be welcomed by college and university students seeking an accessible and authoritative guide to the complex and often intimidating modes of literary and cultural study of the previous half century.

American Shame

American Shame PDF Author: Myra Mendible
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253019869
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Essays examining the role of shame as an American cultural practice and how public shaming enforces conformity and group coherence. On any given day in America’s news cycle, stories and images of disgraced politicians and celebrities solicit our moral indignation, their misdeeds fueling a lucrative economy of shame and scandal. Shame is one of the most coercive, painful, and intriguing of human emotions. Only in recent years has interest in shame extended beyond a focus on the subjective experience of this emotion and its psychological effects. The essays collected here consider the role of shame as cultural practice and examine ways that public shaming practices enforce conformity and group coherence. Addressing abortion, mental illness, suicide, immigration, and body image among other issues, this volume calls attention to the ways shaming practices create and police social boundaries; how shaming speech is endorsed, judged, or challenged by various groups; and the distinct ways that shame is encoded and embodied in a nation that prides itself on individualism, diversity, and exceptionalism. Examining shame through a prism of race, sexuality, ethnicity, and gender, these provocative essays offer a broader understanding of how America’s discourse of shame helps to define its people as citizens, spectators, consumers, and moral actors. “An eclectic anthology, it offers the readers more than one argument and perspective, which makes the volume itself lively and rich.” —Ron Scapp, coeditor of Fashion Statements: On Style, Appearance, and Reality

Property, Place and Piracy

Property, Place and Piracy PDF Author: Martin Fredriksson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135172021X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description
This book takes the concept of piracy as a starting point to discuss the instability of property as a social construction and how this is spatially situated. Piracy is understood as acts and practices that emerge in zones where the construction and definition of property is ambiguous. Media piracy is a frequently used example where file-sharers and copyright holders argue whether culture and information is a common resource to be freely shared or property to be protected. This book highlights that this is not a dilemma unique to immaterial resources: concepts such as property, ownership and the rights of use are just as diffuse when it comes to spatial resources such as land, water, air or urban space. By structuring the book around this heterogeneous understanding of piracy as an analytical perspective, the editors and contributors advance a trans-disciplinary and multi-theoretical approach to place and property. In doing so, the book moves from theoretical discussions on commons and property to empirical cases concerning access to and appropriation of land, natural and cultural resources. The chapters cover areas such as maritime piracy, the philosophical and legal foundations of property rights, mining and land rights, biopiracy and traditional knowledge, indigenous rights, colonization of space, military expansionism and the enclosure of urban space. This book is essential reading for a variety of disciplines including indigenous studies, cultural studies, geography, political economy, law, environmental studies and all readers concerned with piracy and the ambiguity of property.