Juridical Humanity: A Colonial History.

• Author: Reynolds, John
• Position: Book review

Samera Esmeir, Juridical Humanity: A Colonial History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012).

Through the spring of 2012, the Musee du Quai Branly in Paris hosted an exhibition entitled Human Zoos: The Invention of the Savage. It was a remarkable exploration of colonial constructions of racial difference through the phenomenon of the travelling human zoo. The various forms in which native 'specimens' were exhibited before voyeuristic Western audiences-- circus carnivals, theatre productions, fairs, freak shows, zoos, parades, mock ethnic villages--spanned a period of almost five centuries, reaching their apogee in the late nineteenth century, and enduring until Europe's final colonial fair in 1958. With the colonial other--'the strange, the savage and the monster'--routinely showcased in enclosures and scenes alongside animals, even the most cursory analysis reveals a blurring of the lines between human and beast, between colonized person and creature. Prevailing theories of racial superiority were embedded, and conquest legitimized, through the act of 'exhibiting' the inferior genus in the form of spectacle. (1) Social, cultural and biological elements of the racial dynamic coalesced to narrate a story of the reduction of the colonized to a status less than human. This was the case in the representations of Aboriginal and American tribes, Asian and African savages; (2) it transcended traditional racial indicators to extend also to Irish itinerants. (3)

The colonized Arab other was also very much present in this story, but perhaps cast in a less overtly subhuman role. The "Egyptian Caravan" that spent two months in Paris in 1891, for instance, played on orientalist depictions of an exotic Arabia, (4) but arguably did not explicitly purport to dehumanize its troupe in the way that many other colonial performances did. While this is an opaque and unstated distinction, some visitors may have left the Quai Branly exposition with questions over the extent to which trajectories of racial discourse and constructed gradations of humanity varied across colonial time and space, and the reasons for such.

Samera Esmeir's Juridical Humanity, (5) a compelling account of the relationship between modern law and the human in colonial Egypt, points to a similar ambivalence in colonizer-colonized dynamics. At the same time as the "Egyptian Caravan" was traversing the metropoles of Europe, Britain was immersed in a process of wholesale legal reform in Egypt. Following the Urabi revolution and British military conquest of the country in 1882, the colonial state embarked upon a juridical venture aimed at overhauling the legal system inherited from the pre-colonial Khedive. The mission was to emancipate Egyptians from the arbitrary and inhumane cruelties of Khedival rule, and to elevate them to a status of humanity previously lacking. Positive law was the force of modernity that would generate a rupture from the arbitrary violence of the pre-colonial past. The book tells a story of how modern law engendered a concept of what the author terms 'juridical humanity' that was rooted in sensibilities of humaneness and operated to inscribe the native Egyptian within the colonial rule of law. Through this particular narrative, Esmeir probes the more general relationship between law and the human with regard to history, nature, sovereignty and violence.

Juridical Humanity is a pioneering piece of work. Prominent thinkers of Western modernity--Agamben, Arendt, Butler, Derrida, Foucault, Latour, and others--have of course extensively constructed and deconstructed the question of the 'human' and the dehumanizing designs of sovereign power (though rarely with direct reference to colonial paradigms). (6) Scholars writing in the anti-colonial and postcolonial traditions, for their part, have trenchantly theorized the dehumanizing intentions of imperialism in the colony. (7) Esmeir navigates all of this literature and more, but plots her own distinctive course through the relatively unchartered waters of legal narratives in British Egypt.

The concept of juridical humanity both borrows from and departs from Hannah Arendt's articulation of the 'juridical person'. (8) Whereas in Arendt's account violence is a product of exclusion from the law (in the form of denationalization, or, in extremis, the camps' location outside of the 'normal'...