Mariana Valverde: Chronotopes of Law: Jurisdiction, Scale and Governance
| Published date | 01 December 2015 |
| Date | 01 December 2015 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6478.2015.00732.x |
| Author | Andreas Philippopoulos‐Mihalopoulos |
CHRONOTOPES OF LAW: JURISDICTION, SCALE AND GOVERNANCE
by MARIANA VALVERDE
(Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2014, 198 pp., £85.00)
Mariana Valverde's new book is an important one. It does something that
only recently has been systematically attempted in legal theoretical research:
it tries to think of time and space together.
1
It reclaims a role for time within
the ambits of legal geography, but it does not do so at the expense of space.
Valverde is a committed spatio-legal scholar who has regularly, whether
explicitly or not, included temporality in her work, and in this book she
addresses these considerations in a variety of discussions, ranging from a re-
reading of early feminist scholarship, to courtroom analysis, to the Canadian
justice system.
The book is pitched at an audience of socio-legal scholars and students,
and can be read in chapter bites, since each chapter is followed by an indivi-
dual bibliography. What links them all is the idea of the spatio-temporal. The
title of the book, Chronotopes, refers to a neologism employed by Mikhail
Bakhtin in his literary criticism work (mainly that of 1981).
2
Bakhtin defines
chronotopes as:
the intrinsic connectedness of spatial and temporal relationships that are
artistically expressed in literature . .. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh,
becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive
to the movements of time, plot, and history.
3
This fleshy formulation, full of affects, sensoriality, and movement, is
Bakhtin's analytical tool for the various literary works he tackles, from
ancient Greeks to contemporary Russians. Valverde `borrows' (her term)
chronotopes, along with two other Bakhtinian neologisms, namely, hetero-
glossia and dialogism, referring to the multiplicity of utterances constituting
the world through interaction, and transposes them to socio-legal research.
This book comes at a time when an interest in the spatiality of law is
becoming relatively established (although still by no means the norm) and
where a vivid interest in materiality, affectivity, and the politics of resistance
are claiming the spot of the vanguard. The intention to bring the temporal
together with the spatial is pivotal, and the case this book makes for it is
eloquent and erudite. It leaves open, however, a question of timing, as it
were. Valverde (p. 26) writes:
While scholars associated with geography tend to fall into spatial determinism,
or else add a historical layer of analysis to the more thorough study of
spatialization, those whose reading habits and institutional locations lean
668
1 See I. Braverman et al. (eds.), The Expanding Spaces of Law: A Timely Legal
Geography (2014).
2 M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, tr. by C. Emerson and M.
Holquist (1981).
3 id., p. 84 (quoted in Valverde, pp. 9±10).
ß2015 The Author. Journal of Law and Society ß2015 Cardiff University Law School
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