Past IILAH Reading Group

This year, the IILAH reading group will read thematically around the “colonial, postcolonial and decolonial” from different scholarly traditions. We will explore the methods, forms and crafts of thinking about colonialism and law, and how we may write and act to further projects of decolonisation.

The reading group will be co-convened in 2021 by Tim Lindgren, Caitlin Murphy and Sundhya Pahuja. If you don’t have a unimelb login but would like to attend the Reading Group, please email Tim Lindgren or Caitlin Murphy to provide you with copies.  We are hoping to meet face to face again this year, but if you don’t live in Melbourne and would like to attend, please get in touch with Tim Lindgren.

The IILAH Reading Group will recommence for Semester 2, 2021 on Wednesday 4 August from 1:00 pm (meeting fortnightly).

Muhammad al-Idris’s World map in Nuzhat al-mushtāq fī ikhtirāq al-āfāq from 1154, known in the west as Tabula Rogeriana

Semester 1, 2021

• Wednesday10 March2021

  • Aileen Moreton-Robinson, 'Virtuous Racial States: White Sovereignty and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples' in The White Possessive: Property, Power and Indigenous Sovereignty (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) 173.

    Available through the library here.

• Wednesday24 March2021

  • Gurminder Bhambra, 'Postcolonial and decolonial dialogues' (2014) 17(2) Postcolonial Studies 115.

    Available through the library here.

• Wednesday7 April2021

  • Christopher Gevers, ‘Literal ‘Decolonization’: Re-reading African International Legal Scholarship through the African novel’ in Jochen von Bernstoff and Phillip Dann (eds), The Battle for International Law: South-North Perspectives on the Decolonization Era (Oxford University Press, 2019) 383.

    Available through the library here.

• Wednesday21 April2021

  • Daniel Elam, ‘Bhagat Singh’s Jail Notebook’ in World Literature for the wretched of the earth: anticolonial aesthetics, postcolonial politics (Fordham University Press, 2021) 92.

    Available through the library here.

• Wednesday5 May2021

  • Brenna Bhandar, Rafeef Ziadah, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Avery F. Gordon, Angela Y. Davis, ‘Abolition Feminism’ in Brenna Bhandar and Rafeef Ziadah (eds), Revolutionary Feminisms: Conversations on Collective Action and Radical Thought (Verso, 2020) 136.

    Available through the library here.

• Wednesday19 May2021

  • Rahul Rao, ‘Introduction’ in Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality (Oxford University Press, 2020) 1.

    Available through the library here.

• Wednesday2 June2021

  • Walter Mignolo, ‘What Does it Mean to Decolonize?’ in Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh (eds) On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (Duke University Press, 2018) 105.

    RSVP to Connor Foley to access this reading.

Semester 2, 2021

• Wednesday4 August2021

  • Peter Fitzpatrick, ‘The Revolutionary Past: Decolonizing Law and Human Rights’ (2013) 5(2) Revista de Estudos Constitucionais, Hermenêutics e Teoria do Direito 97.

    Available through the library here.

• Wednesday18 August2021

  • Luis Eslava, ‘Trigueño International Law: On (Most of the World) being (Always, Somehow) out of place (2020) Draft in preparation, Ed. Volume: Out of Place: Power, Person and Difference in Socio-Legal Research.

    RSVP to Connor Foley to access this reading.

• Wednesday1 Sept2021

  • Paulo Ilich Bacca, ‘The Double Bind and the Reverse Side of the International Legal Order’ (2020) 1 TWAIL Review 93.

    Available through the library here.

• Wednesday15 Sept2021

  • Chinweizu, Decolonising the African mind (Sundoor, 1987).

    RSVP to Connor Foley to access this reading.

• Wednesday29 Sept2021

  • Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, ‘Decolonization is not a metaphor’ (2012) 1(1) Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1.

    Available through the library here.

• Wednesday13 Oct2021

  • Irene Watson, ‘First Nation Stories, Grandmother’s Law: Too Many Stories to Tell’ in Heather Douglas, Francesca Bartlett, Trish Luker and Rosemary Hunter (eds), Australian Feminist Judgements: Righting and Rewriting Law (Hart Publishing, 2014) 41.

    Available through the library here.

• Wednesday27 Oct2021

  • Ruth Buchanan and Jeffery G. Hewitt, ‘Treaty Canoe’ in Jessie Hohmann and Daniel Joyce (eds), International Law’s Objects (Oxford University Press, 2018) 491.

    Available through the library here.

Participating in the IILAH Reading Groups

If you would like to introduce a reading to the group, please contact IILAH Director, Professor Sundhya Pahuja at s.pahuja@unimelb.edu.au.

Past Reading Groups

2020      World Making: Technologies, Histories, Laws (S1); The University (S2)
2019      Models of Interdisciplinarity in Law and the Humanities
2018      The Office of the International Lawyer and the Plurality of International Law
2017      International Law and Race
2016      International Law and Language