Of Stranger Spaces

Of Stranger Spaces

Description

The link between the words “stereotype” and “cliché” is an etymological expression of the relationship between social strangers and literary discourse. This chapter addresses the question of literary form by focusing on the genre of utopian literature, which provides a useful picture of estrangement from the real worlds we inhabit and gives rise to a productive self-consciousness in their readers. However, it argues that utopias fail as both art and governance plans because the worlds they conjure are at best illiberal and anti-legal. It compares the illiberalism of utopias with the anti-totalitarianism of “heterotopias,” a concept introduced by Michel Foucault, and suggests that legal heterotopias can exploit the virtues of utopian thinking without being entrapped by its vices. It also argues that legal actors often deprive themselves of force precisely to engage in flights of fancy. The chapter examines three different genres through which the law engages in acts of heterotopian imagination—dissents, hortatory laws, and dicta—and illustrates their important role in the development of the concept of color blindness.

Source Publication

Law and the Stranger

Source Editors/Authors

Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas, Martha Merrill Umphrey

Publication Date

2010

Of Stranger Spaces

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