The Courtroom as a Space of Resistance

"This timely and powerful volume presents the court not as a neutral instrument of justice but as a site of contestation and critique, where the normative and performative clash, and where discourses of domination encounter practices of resistance. The chapters are challenging in the best sense of the word - they contest accepted views and interrogate received orthodoxies." - Lawrence Douglas, Amherst College, USA

"A welcome collection of intelligently crafted and often inspirational analyses that look back to the Rivonia Trial, a legendary and dramatic event in the struggle against Apartheid. At its heart, of course, is the bold and gracious figure of Nelson Mandela, the accused, engaging the rapt court with his momentous speech: a supreme act of resistance, articulated through the sincere admiration of Law, which served to expose the absurdities and betrayals of apartheid's perversion of Justice. The contributors explore the trial from their many complementary perspectives, showing how Mandela's vision for what seemed then like an impossible post-apartheid South Africa was a gift to which, still, we cannot stop giving time." - Vikki Bell, Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK

"Allo argues that in what came to be regarded as “the trial that changed South Africa,” Nelson Mandela summed up the spirit of the liberation struggle and the moral basis for the postApartheid society, invoking law while undermining it, using it while subverting it, claiming it while defeating it, and opening a political space within the legal. Contributors to this volume return to the Rivonia courtroom to engage with the event, reflecting on its personal, spatial, temporal, performative, and literary dimensions."
Law and Social Inquiry Journal