Description
The modern state, law, and constitution result from a legal canon that (re)produces the abyssal lines dividing the world that is validated from the world whose humanity and epistemological validity are denied. This book aims to contribute to a post-abyssal reflection on law and constitutionalism by considering the structural axes of power that are constitutive of modern law “capitalism, colonialism, and heteropatriarchy” alongside the legal plurality of the world. Is it possible to decolonize, decommodify, and depatriarchalize the constitution? The authors speak from multiple geographies, raise different questions, resort to differentiated theoretical approaches, and reveal varying levels of optimism about the possibilities of transforming constitutions. The readers are confronted with critical perspectives on the Eurocentric legal canon, as well as with the recognition of anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, and anti-patriarchal legal experiences. The horizon of this publication is the expansion of the possibilities of legal and political imagination.
Table of Contents
Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Sara Araújo and Orlando Aragón Andrade
Preface
Boaventura de Sousa Santos; Sara Araújo; Orlando Aragón Andrade
Introduction: The Constitution, the state, the law and the epistemologies of the South
Part 1. The vast landscape of constitutionalisms
1. Issa G. Shivji
Do Constitutions Matter?: The dilemma of a radical lawyer
2. Asifa Quraishi-Landes
Healing a Wounded Islamic Constitutionalism: Sharia, legal pluralism, and unlearning the nation-state paradigm
3. Upendra Baxi
Nihilisms, Contradictions, and Anomie in New Constitutionalisms: A view from India
4. Rosalva Aída Hernandez
Indigenous Women: Towards a New Transformative Constitutionalism?
5. Sara Araújo
Modern Constitutionalism, Legal Pluralism and the Waste of Experience
Part 2. Post-colonial Transitions: The case of South Africa
6. Heinz Klug
Legacies and Latitudes: Past, present and future in South Africa’s post-colonial legal order
7. Albie Sachs
Shared Experiences from South Africa Constitutional Court
8. Tshepo Madlingozi
On Settler Colonialism and Post-Conquest Constitutionness: The decolonising constitutional Vvsion of African nationalists of Azania/South Africa
Part 3. The return of the abyssally excluded?: The indigenous constitutional struggles in Latin America
9. Salvador Schavelzon
Can Silence be a Constituent?: A reading of the indigenous-communitarian constitutionalism of Bolivia
10. Raúl Llasag
Plurinational Constitutionalism: Plurinationality from above and plurinationality from below
11. Nina Pacari
Transformational Constitutionalism, Interculturality and the Reform of the State: Looking through the eyes of the originary peoples
12. Agustín Grijalva
Participation and Presidentialism in the Ecuadorian Constitution of 2008
13. Orlando Aragón Andrade
Transforming Transformative Constitutionalism: Lessons from the political-legal experience of Cherán, Mexico
14. Boaventura de Sousa Santos
The Law of the Excluded: Indigenous justice, plurinationality and interculturality in Bolivia and Ecuador
Conclusion
