Griffith Law Review – Law Theory Society invites submissions for its symposium, Law and The Modalities of Nostalgia.
Symposium Editor Rob McQueen.
Deadline for Manuscripts 28 January 2011.
This symposium will focus on issues raised by, amongst others, Paul Gilroy in Colonial Melancholia (2005) and Svetlana Boym in The Future of Nostalgia (2002) regarding the ambivalent and often conflictual nature of social memory both in colonising and colonised states.
The complicity of “law” in the colonising process means that in the interplay of past and present it often depends on ones vantage point as to whether law might afford a possible solution to conflicts and perceived social problems in the present in postcolonial states, or alternatively be perceived as contributing to the irresolution of a grim colonial past.
This ambivalence is epitomized in Australia by the co-existence of a cathartic moment a formal apology to indigenous Australians by an Australian Prime Minister with the legally sanctioned neo-colonialism of the “Intervention” in remote indigenous communities and the offshore “processing” of “boat people.”
