The Mythology of Law: Colonial and Anti-Colonial World-Making

Abstract

Genealogies destabilise representations, empowering us to interrogate the ideologies and relationships of power they sustain. As Amia Srinivasan argues, historians are primarily concerned with the co-origination of representations with ‘patterns of domination’. What follows is world-making: the reshaping of reality by exploiting the constitutive connections between representations and the social world they inhabit. By dispelling the fictions underlying the representations we take for granted, we ‘change what is true and what (and who) exists’