Legal Moves: Choreographies of Race, Law, and Empire

Legal Moves engages in a project of epistemological disobedience, boldly suturing concepts of dance studies-kinesthetic awareness, fleshly memory, and techniques of the body-to the legal humanities. What opens when we expand our disciplinary methods of law-from the lettered to the embodied? Might we locate a more complete portrait of law, its logic, and impact for construction of the human?

Anna Jayne Kimmel combs the laws and law-making logics of French imperial order and its postcolonial legacy to surface the already-embedded corporeal attentions and choreographic features of legal studies. The book moves across analysis of seventeenth-century French legal codes of conduct that structured race and empire within the metropole and its overseas horizons, twentieth-century scenes of police violence during anti-colonial protest in France, twenty-first century anxieties of assembly in postcolonial Algeria, and embodied aesthetics contained within human rights discourse. By tracing disciplined histories of dance notation, Kimmel argues laws have long operated as a societal score which script movements and conscript citizens into racialized categories of (non)being. Drawing upon archival material, legal records, and performance practice, Legal Moves calls to reimagine the human within Western jurisprudence of the body.