Shane Chalmers
Biographic Data
| ID | 5625414 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Shane Chalmers |
| GIVEN NAMES | Shane |
| FAMILY NAME | Chalmers |
| SIGNATURE | CHALMERS S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Australian National University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1410-4789 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 6 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Vortext
This article introduces the special issue of Law & Literature on “Colonial Legal Imaginaries | Southern Literary Futures”. The aim is to advance two imperative tasks. The first, analytic, task is to pay attention to the diversity of colonial imaginaries across the very different terrains, literatures, and epistemologies of the so-called South. Rather than continue to impose a Eurocentric canon on the domain of law and literature, the argument her…
The Rule of Law and International Development
The aim of this chapter is twofold: to provide an overview of the international development project’s ‘rule of law’ agenda, and to do so in a way that shows its mythological character. In 1992 Peter Fitzpatrick published The Mythology of Modern Law, a work that exposed the constitutive relation between Europe’s racialised imperialism and its conception of modern law. In the three decades since, a renewed field of law and development has grown, th…
The Utopian Law and Literature of Systematic Colonisation
Edward Gibbon Wakefield is usually remembered as the English political economist whose theorisation of “systematic colonisation” provided the blueprint for the establishment of British colonies in Australia and New Zealand. This paper re-reads Wakefield’s writings on systematic colonisation as works of utopian literature, which not only represented a social fantasy that was deeply capitalist, but worked to realise the settler-colonial projects th…
Metaphoric Sovereignty and the Australian Settler Colonial State
There is a pronounced anxiety within Australian jurisprudence at the use of metaphor in the creation of the law. This essay argues that the anxiety is symptomatic of the fact that metaphor is not only the source of Australian law, but the source of this law’s very (il)legitimacy. To develop this argument the first half of the essay focuses on Australian High Court cases that have addressed the use of metaphor in the creation of the law. Here the …
Expressive Insurgency
Expressive Insurgency:Theft is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory by Robert Nichols Shane Chalmers (bio) Robert Nichols. Theft Is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. 248 pp. $25.95. ISBN: 9781478006732. On the front cover of Theft is Property! is a remarkable work of ledger art created by Oglala Lakota artist Donald Montileaux (Yellowbird). Six Lakota warriors on horseback can be seen rid…
The festival as constitutional event and as jurisdictional encounter
The year 2020 marked the first meeting between an Australian government – the Government of Victoria – and First Nations in a treaty-making process. Given the importance of this, it is timely to recall a moment when another opportunity to meet was missed. That moment was a foundational one for the nascent colonial state: a public festival held in 1850 to celebrate the inauguration of the Colony of Victoria. There are two aspects to this festival …
Law’s Pluralism
This essay makes a theoretical argument for reimagining ‘the rule of law’ in light of ‘legal pluralism’. Building on the work of Desmond Manderson and Roderick Macdonald in particular, the essay considers what it means for law’s pluralism—the differences that animate the everyday life of law—to be the very pulse of its rule. In doing so, the essay seeks to open the frame that has been placed around the rule of law in two ways. On one side: to see…
Native dignity
The article presents a reading of the painting Native Dignity (1860) by Anglo-Australian artist S T Gill. In treating the painting first as an artefact, the article shows how a discourse of dignity is embedded in it, in a way that registers its constituent understandings, anxieties, and contradictions. The result is a genealogy of ‘native dignity’ that traces its movement between Europe and Australia – a movement that reveals its terrible cost fo…
Terra Nullius? Temporal Legal Pluralism in an Australian Colony
There remains a puzzle as to the status of Indigenous land rights in Australian colonial law. The common view is that the laws of the British colonies, and subsequently of the federated state, did not recognise Indigenous land rights until late in the 20th century. Against this, a smaller body of scholarship argues that recognition had already occurred much earlier, the clearest instance being in the colony of South Australia in the 1830s and 184…
Negative Mythology
The Mythology of International Rule-of-Law Promotion
In 1992 Peter Fitzpatrick published The Mythology of Modern Law, a work that exposed the constitutive relation between Europe’s racialized imperialism and its conception of modern law. In the three decades since, a renewed field of “law and development” has grown, this time in the name of “the rule of law.” This Article shows how the mythology of modern law endures in this field of rule-of-law development. To do this, Part I draws out the main th…
The Chameleon Subject
This article is concerned with the life of the subject that is always also an object. More specifically, it is concerned with the condition of being exposed to death by law, and how this is a condition of the living subject. The article examines this condition through analysis of two photographs by Beninese artists Joseph Moise Agbodjélou and Leonce Raphael Agbodjélou. These photographs enable us to see how representation is critical to the emanc…
Law’s Pluralism
This article makes a theoretical argument for reimagining “the rule of law” in light of “legal pluralism.” Building on the work of Desmond Manderson and Roderick Macdonald in particular, the article considers what it means for law’s pluralism – the differences that animate the everyday life of law – to be the very pulse of its rule. In doing so, the article seeks to open the frame that has been placed around the rule of law in two ways. On one si…
Civil Death in the Dominion of Freedom
Terra Nullius? Temporal Legal Pluralism in an Australian Colony
There remains a puzzle as to the status of Indigenous land rights in Australian colonial law. The common view is that the laws of the British colonies, and subsequently of the federated state, did not recognise Indigenous land rights until late in the 20th century. Against this, a smaller body of scholarship argues that recognition had already occurred much earlier, the clearest instance being in the colony of South Australia in the 1830s and 184…
The Mythology of International Rule-of-Law Promotion
In 1992 Peter Fitzpatrick published The Mythology of Modern Law, a work that exposed the constitutive relation between Europe’s racialized imperialism and its conception of modern law. In the three decades since, a renewed field of “law and development” has grown, this time in the name of “the rule of law.” This Article shows how the mythology of modern law endures in this field of rule-of-law development. To do this, Part I draws out the main th…
Native dignity
The article presents a reading of the painting Native Dignity (1860) by Anglo-Australian artist S T Gill. In treating the painting first as an artefact, the article shows how a discourse of dignity is embedded in it, in a way that registers its constituent understandings, anxieties, and contradictions. The result is a genealogy of ‘native dignity’ that traces its movement between Europe and Australia – a movement that reveals its terrible cost fo…
Negative Mythology
Law’s Pluralism
This article makes a theoretical argument for reimagining “the rule of law” in light of “legal pluralism.” Building on the work of Desmond Manderson and Roderick Macdonald in particular, the article considers what it means for law’s pluralism – the differences that animate the everyday life of law – to be the very pulse of its rule. In doing so, the article seeks to open the frame that has been placed around the rule of law in two ways. On one si…
Civil Death in the Dominion of Freedom
The Chameleon Subject
This article is concerned with the life of the subject that is always also an object. More specifically, it is concerned with the condition of being exposed to death by law, and how this is a condition of the living subject. The article examines this condition through analysis of two photographs by Beninese artists Joseph Moise Agbodjélou and Leonce Raphael Agbodjélou. These photographs enable us to see how representation is critical to the emanc…
Terra Nullius? Temporal Legal Pluralism in an Australian Colony
There remains a puzzle as to the status of Indigenous land rights in Australian colonial law. The common view is that the laws of the British colonies, and subsequently of the federated state, did not recognise Indigenous land rights until late in the 20th century. Against this, a smaller body of scholarship argues that recognition had already occurred much earlier, the clearest instance being in the colony of South Australia in the 1830s and 184…
Negative Mythology
The Mythology of International Rule-of-Law Promotion
In 1992 Peter Fitzpatrick published The Mythology of Modern Law, a work that exposed the constitutive relation between Europe’s racialized imperialism and its conception of modern law. In the three decades since, a renewed field of “law and development” has grown, this time in the name of “the rule of law.” This Article shows how the mythology of modern law endures in this field of rule-of-law development. To do this, Part I draws out the main th…
Native dignity
The article presents a reading of the painting Native Dignity (1860) by Anglo-Australian artist S T Gill. In treating the painting first as an artefact, the article shows how a discourse of dignity is embedded in it, in a way that registers its constituent understandings, anxieties, and contradictions. The result is a genealogy of ‘native dignity’ that traces its movement between Europe and Australia – a movement that reveals its terrible cost fo…
Expressive Insurgency
Expressive Insurgency:Theft is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory by Robert Nichols Shane Chalmers (bio) Robert Nichols. Theft Is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. 248 pp. $25.95. ISBN: 9781478006732. On the front cover of Theft is Property! is a remarkable work of ledger art created by Oglala Lakota artist Donald Montileaux (Yellowbird). Six Lakota warriors on horseback can be seen rid…
The festival as constitutional event and as jurisdictional encounter
The year 2020 marked the first meeting between an Australian government – the Government of Victoria – and First Nations in a treaty-making process. Given the importance of this, it is timely to recall a moment when another opportunity to meet was missed. That moment was a foundational one for the nascent colonial state: a public festival held in 1850 to celebrate the inauguration of the Colony of Victoria. There are two aspects to this festival …
Law’s Pluralism
This essay makes a theoretical argument for reimagining ‘the rule of law’ in light of ‘legal pluralism’. Building on the work of Desmond Manderson and Roderick Macdonald in particular, the essay considers what it means for law’s pluralism—the differences that animate the everyday life of law—to be the very pulse of its rule. In doing so, the essay seeks to open the frame that has been placed around the rule of law in two ways. On one side: to see…
Metaphoric Sovereignty and the Australian Settler Colonial State
There is a pronounced anxiety within Australian jurisprudence at the use of metaphor in the creation of the law. This essay argues that the anxiety is symptomatic of the fact that metaphor is not only the source of Australian law, but the source of this law’s very (il)legitimacy. To develop this argument the first half of the essay focuses on Australian High Court cases that have addressed the use of metaphor in the creation of the law. Here the …
The Rule of Law and International Development
The aim of this chapter is twofold: to provide an overview of the international development project’s ‘rule of law’ agenda, and to do so in a way that shows its mythological character. In 1992 Peter Fitzpatrick published The Mythology of Modern Law, a work that exposed the constitutive relation between Europe’s racialised imperialism and its conception of modern law. In the three decades since, a renewed field of law and development has grown, th…
The Utopian Law and Literature of Systematic Colonisation
Edward Gibbon Wakefield is usually remembered as the English political economist whose theorisation of “systematic colonisation” provided the blueprint for the establishment of British colonies in Australia and New Zealand. This paper re-reads Wakefield’s writings on systematic colonisation as works of utopian literature, which not only represented a social fantasy that was deeply capitalist, but worked to realise the settler-colonial projects th…
Vortext
This article introduces the special issue of Law & Literature on “Colonial Legal Imaginaries | Southern Literary Futures”. The aim is to advance two imperative tasks. The first, analytic, task is to pay attention to the diversity of colonial imaginaries across the very different terrains, literatures, and epistemologies of the so-called South. Rather than continue to impose a Eurocentric canon on the domain of law and literature, the argument her…
Law (14 works) · Political science (14 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Law (10 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Law in Society and Culture (7 works) · Politics (7 works) · Colonialism (6 works) · Comparative law (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works)