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Black/African Science Fiction and the Quest for Racial Justice through Legal Knowledge: How Can We Unsettle Euro-modern Time and Temporality in Our Teaching?

Abstract

This paper argues that the relationship between law, time, temporality, race and racism is vital to understanding the continuous reproduction of racial injustice and the making permanent of colonial logics. This entanglement is exemplified in the extension, recreation and adaptation of those colonial logics of the human and space-time beyond the time of both racialised enslavement and exploitative colonisation. This paper further argues that the absence of a detailed and central examination of these junctures within legal knowledge – especially in teaching but also in research – can be addressed by recourse to science fiction. A specific area of science fiction, collectively termed here Black/African Science Fiction, has made inroads into unsettling Euro-modern law’s chronopolitics. Using Octavia Butler’s Kindred as an example, this paper argues that Black/African Science Fiction can help us to reframe legal knowledge to disrupt the inevitability of our current version of the future and the question of inevitability itself.

Published: 2022-11-14
Pages:24 to 37
Section: Symposium: Jurisprudence of the Future
How to Cite
Adebisi, Foluke. 2022. “Black/African Science Fiction and the Quest for Racial Justice through Legal Knowledge: How Can We Unsettle Euro-Modern Time and Temporality in Our Teaching?”. Law, Technology and Humans 4 (2):24-37. https://doi.org/10.5204/lthj.2507.

Author Biography

University of Bristol
United Kingdom United Kingdom

Dr Foluke Ifejola Adebisi is an Associate Professor at the Law School, University of Bristol. Her scholarship focuses mainly on the relationship between theories of decolonisation and how they do and can interact with legal knowledge. Thus, her scholarly work is concerned with what happens at the intersection of legal education, law, society, and a history of changing ideas of what it means to be human. She found and runs Forever Africa Conference and Events (FACE), a Pan-African interdisciplinary conference. She blogs about her scholarship and pedagogy on her website ‘Foluke’s African Skies’ at https://FolukeAfrica.com. Her monograph “Decolonisation and Legal Knowledge: Reflections on Power and Possibility” will be published by Bristol University Press on the 1st of March 2023. 

Open Access Journal
ISSN 2652-4074