Book Review: STEVE GREENFIELD and GUY OSBORN (eds), Readings in Law and Popular Culture. London: Routledge, 2006, 328 pp., ISBN 0415376475, £85 (hbk)
| Date | 01 September 2008 |
| Published date | 01 September 2008 |
| DOI | 10.1177/09646639080170030704 |
| Author | Leslie J. Moran |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
role played by law in institutionalizing the ‘interval of hesitation’ (see Bankowski,
p. 60), centring around Nelson Mandela’s release, by way of transitional arrangements
that facilitated, first, years of negotiations and, now, social rearrangement. There has
been too little change in South Africa and it has been too slow; but it is no longer a
settler colony.
In other words, a blindspot is responsible for the pessimistic conclusions drawn in
these chapters. One implication is that they should be read as offering no more than
(very compelling) critiques of indigenous title claims as a mode of reconciliation.
Another, more important, implication concerns the reason for this blindspot. The
failure to notice the difference between South Africa and Australia/Canada springs
from a failure to attend to a fourth facet of transitions that operates alongside and
interacts with law, politics and reconciliation – justice. It is differences in the social
and political justice of their circumstances that account for the extent to which the
indigenous inhabitants of South Africa, Canada and Australia differ in the degree of
their emancipation from the bonds of settler colonization. The maintenance, the protec-
tion, of past injustice, so thoroughly demonstrated in these essays, is what marks out
the treatment of indigenous land claims as anything but truly transformative and
delineates the contrast with South Africa. And it is the absence of justice as a variable
in their treatment of reconciliatory practices that ultimately makes these pessimistic
analyses less than cogent.
That absence is also observable in the title of this collection and in the Introduc-
tion. Justice is not flagged as a formant and criterion of reconciliatory practices. That
said, several contributions do draw on considerations of justice. Du Toit, for example,
provides a convincing exposé of the TRC’s contribution to patriarchy through its
failure to engage with rape as a political act, and develops this powerfully into a critique
of the ‘feminization’ of reconciliation and an accompanying argument for an alterna-
tive, empowering, notion of reconciliation. A concern with justice is also pivotal in the
analyses by Moon and McGregor, and animates the unfortunately rather meandering
attempt by Van Marle to engage with South African constitutional law.
However, one should not make too much of what may have been lost through the
absence of justice from the overall analytical framework. No book can exhaust every
angle. As it is, there are dimensions of this collection that this review has passed over
in silence – not least the fascinating exploration of the theological roots of recon-
ciliation by Atria, Bankowski and Czarnota, the last of whom raises the important
question of whether it can still do its work in our globalized, secular society. And
then there is the question of time, recurring throughout this volume, as well as
Zumbansen’s situating of reconciliatory practices in the ‘emergence of a transnational
law of post-conflict justice’ (p. 130) that now also covers Iraq. I hope enough has been
said, however, to show that this is a work that, in depth as well as in breadth, will
repay with considerable interest the time spent reading it.
FRANÇOIS DU BOIS
School of Law, University of Nottingham, UK
STEVE GREENFIELD and GUY OSBORN (eds), Readings in Law and Popular Culture.
London: Routledge, 2006, 328 pp., ISBN 0415376475, £85 (hbk).
This book, the editors explain in their introductory essay, offers a snapshot of the
state of law and popular culture scholarship. Made up of 13 essays by British scholars,
it is more specifically a snapshot of British scholarship on law and popular culture.
For that reason alone it is an important collection.
BOOK REVIEWS 413
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