Imperial Law as Identity Politics: A Subjective Perspective

Colonial legal historiography takes various forms. Here I concentrate on a less common lens to examine juridical relationships between colonial subjects and their respective normative structures (or, in this case, empire). In this paper, I examine the ubiquitous struggle for and against agency that occurs in non-linear processes of (re)imagining legal codes to show how subjects are situated in relation to various juridical constructs. I argue that this battle over individual or collective agentic status is a result of law’s ability to create and to stratify (or, graph) the degree of “personhood” ceded to subjects. This capacity of law can prima facie be seen as impacting two aims of empire, the need to adjudicate difference (and thus define/limit colonial personhood – the local agenda) and the desire to extend imperial influence (the universal agenda). Concentrating on the former, I conclude that the effort to concretize subjective difference in these spaces can be seen as a strategic objective to normalize the space governed. This then necessitates correlative tactical responses by subjects.¹