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 | The Law Is a White Dog: |
ADDITIONAL REVIEWS: "Interdisciplinary scholar Colin Dayan's most recent book, The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons, presents a postmodern blend of anthropology, social critique, and legal history that deconstructs the Enlightenment rationality generally associated with law. Dayan examines some of the ways in which the mechanisms of our legal system perpetuate 'violence and oppression' (p. xvii) alongside progress and modernity. Going beyond traditional histories and examinations of the law, her book explores how larger socio-legal processes, like marginalization, the creation of social outcasts, and the justification of brutal penal practices, shape our present-day society. Dayan, who serves simultaneously as anthropologist, social critic, and poet, depicts the darker side of American society and the often repressive character of our law. . . . Written by an author well known for previous interdisciplinary work in cultural studies and law, this book is a must-have for both general academic libraries and academic law libraries. The writing is crisp, and the way in which Dayan assembles a wide array of topics that are rarely grouped together is thought-provoking and engaging. The book addresses important social questions and reveals the subtle ways that idiosyncratic legal reasoning works to rationalize harsh social processes. Dayan's deconstruction highlights the law as a key mechanism for social control, rather than a narrow area of professional discourse or an administrative or procedural system that touches only a small segment of society. Ultimately, The Law Is a White Dog will prove valuable for anyone who seeks a comprehensive, critical understanding of our society and the role played in it by the law."--Law Library Journal "[T]his work by Dayan is one of the most valuable contemporary books on law and society to come out in quite some time. . . . The Law is a White Dog is an innovative, highly intellectual book . . ."--Choice "A cumulative masterpiece of probing, relevant erudition. . . . More concerned with conceptual structures than local specifics, Dayan breaks rich new critical ground on the well-trodden path from plantation to prison. [A] stunningly insightful yet painstaking inquiry into the very real effects of the ongoing legal and cultural project of defining the boundaries of personhood."--American Literature "Colin Dayan has written a challenging and ambitious book. . . . Its interest for social and political philosophers and philosophers of law will be primarily its engagement with the question of how personhood is defined and materially shaped via the practice of law. . . . The Law is a White Dog offers much, perhaps at exactly the points it frustrates expectation. It would be appropriately read in upper-level undergraduate classes, particularly in philosophy of law, social and political philosophy, and animal studies."--Alexis Shotwell, Philosophy in Review "Colin Dayan's The Law is a White Dog is the most imaginative and passionate (mainly about prison conditions in the US) that I have come across for a long while."--Conor Gearty, LSE Review of Books ADDITIONAL ENDORSEMENTS: "In language that is searing and lyrical, evocative and precise, this exceptional book thinks with the zombies, specters, felons, slaves, dogs, cadavers, and other entities that are the remnants of loss and dispossession in the law. Dogs and people are abundantly present here, even as the legal fictions they are made to inhabit are exposed with acid lucidity. These are hard histories made readable by Dayan's precious acts of writing."--Donna J. Haraway, author of When Species Meet "Colin Dayan's engagement with what she calls the sorcery of the law leads her to trouble narrative movements from ignorance to knowledge, animality to humanity, barbarism to enlightenment, slavery to freedom. In the process she urges us to recognize how legal technologies that once sustained a core contradiction of slavery--that slaves were only accorded legal personality when they committed a crime--now relegate millions of incarcerated persons to civil death. The Law is a White Dog compels us to acknowledge how the ghosts of slavery continue to animate institutions--from Guantanamo to the supermax--that thrive on racialized violence today."--Angela Y. Davis, professor emerita, University of California, Santa Cruz "This is truly an extraordinary book, one which will become a classic of interdisciplinary legal scholarship. Combining memoir, literary criticism, history, cultural studies, and analysis of legal doctrine, this is a fascinating tour de force."--Austin Sarat, Amherst College File created: 5/21/2013 | |
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