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Disciplinary Privilege and the Promise of Decampment: A Response to James Thuo Gathii's “The Promise of International Law: A Third World View”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 March 2021
Extract
It is an immense privilege to respond, as discussant, to James Gathii's 2020 Grotius Lecture.1 I have known and admired Professor Gathii and his work for decades. He is one of those people who manages to combine great accomplishment in international legal scholarship and practice with an unswerving commitment to teaching, collegiality, and mentoring. In these, and in other ways, James Gathii walks his talk. And his talk, as you have heard, is challenging.
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- Twenty‐Second Annual Grotius Lecture: The Promise of International Law: A Third World View
- Information
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The American Society of International Law.
References
1 James Thuo Gathii, Twenty-Second Annual Grotius Lecture: The Promise of International Law: A Third World View (Including a TWAIL Bibliography 1996-2019 as an Appendix), 114 Am. Soc'y Int'l L. Proc. 165 (2020); see also 36 Am. U. Int'l L. Rev. 1, 1 (2020).
2 Id.
3 Id. at 165–66.
4 Promise, Oxford Eng. Dictionary (3d ed. 2007).
5 Gathii, supra note 1, at 168.
6 Id. at 171.
7 See Alana Lentin, What Happens to Anti-Racism When We Are Post-Race?, 19 Feminist Legal Stud. 159, 159–60 (2011) (arguing that “the problematisation of race put forward by anti-racist activists and scholars has been hampered by a post-racial agenda that participates in relativizing the experience of racism, consequently assisting in perpetuating it”); Yin Paradies, Whither Anti-Racism?, 39 Ethnic & Racial Stud. 1, 4 (2016) (introducing the three key critiques of tolerance as anti-racism: (1) “[racial tolerance] is morally inadequate in that racism should be overcome rather than abided,” (2) it “perpetuates or, at least, fails to remedy the asymmetrical power relations inherent in racialized systems of disadvantage/oppression,” and (3) “it cannot be achieved in the context of ‘super-diversity’”).
8 Gathii, supra note 1, at 182–83.
9 Id. at 182 (quoting Vasuki Nesiah).
10 Id. at 168.
11 Thomas Skouteris, The Notion of Progress in International Law Discourse VII (2009) (observing that the idea of progress as a natural and ineluctable force is ubiquitous within the discipline of international law, a narrative which Gathii's lecture rejected).
12 See Ravi de Costa, A Higher Authority: Indigenous Transnationalism and Australia 9 (2006) (observing that First Nations Peoples in Australia were engaged in transnational relations long before colonial displacement, but were compelled to reinvent their transnationalism from the 1970s onwards as part of a global movement oriented around international institutions); Mark McMillan, Koowarta and the Rival Indigenous International: Our Place as Indigenous Peoples in the International, 23 Griffith L. Rev. 110, 117–18 (2014) (characterizing the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007 as a meeting point of law for indigenous people outside of the Anglo-Australian legal system); Mark McMillan & Sophie Rigney, The Place of the First Peoples in the International Sphere: A Logical Starting Point for the Demand for Justice by Indigenous Peoples, 39 Melb. U.L. Rev. 981, 992 (2016) (arguing that indigeneity was developed as a means of stabilizing the international order and justifying colonial expansion, but that this and other fundaments of the modern international remain open to First Nations’ reinvention).
13 See generally Gathii, supra note 1.
14 Id. at 186.
15 Listening, in this context, has relatively little to do with the kind of exchange of arguments and counterarguments routinely enacted in legal practice and scholarship. It recalls, rather, the “insurgent,” uneasy listening of James Baldwin. See Ed Pavlić, Who Can Afford to Improvise? James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners 164, 166, 292–93 (2016) (suggesting that “insurgent listening” of a kind encouraged by the lyric tradition of black music, enables people to touch the turbulence of life and “prompts us to listen more closely to what's going on within, between, and around us”); Shana L. Redmond, Of Treads and Thunder: The Insurgent Listening of Lorraine Hansberry and James Baldwin, 49 Black Scholar: J. Black Stud. & Research 51, 52–53 (2019) (arguing that insurgent listening is “the strategic, interdisciplinary, and multimethod curation of the world as sound” or an attempt at reordering).
16 See generally Gathii, supra note 1.
17 See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture 271, 275 (Cary Nelson & Lawrence Grossberg eds., 1998) (recognizing the role that intellectuals’ experience plays in disclosing the experiences of the oppressed); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Scattered Speculations on the Subaltern and the Popular, 8 Postcolonial Stud. 475, 475 (2005) (“Subalternity cannot be generalized according to hegemonic logic.”).
18 Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony 12 (2001) (“To secure emancipation and recognition, [many African thinkers] thought, required the production of an apologetic discourse based on rediscovery of what was supposed to be the essence, the distinctive genius, of the black ‘race.’”).