Posts com a Tag ‘Sex Law and Sovereignty in French Algeria 1830–1930 (T)’

Judith Surkis | Foto: Brown University |

In recent decades historians, postcolonial theorists and feminist scholars have demonstrated how, in a variety of geographical settings, gendered stereotypes supported the conquest and domination of overseas territories by European colonial regimes. Judith Surkis’s ‘colonial legal genealogy’ of Algeria under French rule significantly develops these now well-established observations by tracing the historically contingent emergence of a legal regime in which ‘sexual fantasies and persistent desires’ underpinned the regulation of both land and legal personhood (p.14). Her objective, she explains, is to ‘reconstruct the “cultural life’ of Algerian colonial law, which is to say the material, political, and affective resources and resonances on which its elaboration and its powerful effects depended’ (p.8). By recognizing the affective dimension of the production, application and negotiation of colonial law, Surkis provides new perspectives on the workings of colonial power in Algeria, and makes an exceptional contribution to historical understanding of the colonial legal regime.