...Genevieve Renard Painter A review of Esmeir Samera , Juridical Humanity: A Colonial History ( Palo Alto : Stanford University Press , 2012 ). Cited in the text as jh . Copyright © 2013 Qui Parle 2013 A Figure in Law and the Archive Samera Esmeir and the Making of Juridical...

.... As the law continually splits, hybridizing itself and becoming unstable, its ideals survive, remaining sublime and holding out promise. Therefore, as Esmeir argues, “when ideals waged their own violence, it was their violence, not their characteristic ideality, that was targeted for critique.” 23 Since...

... pernicious effects. Samera Esmeir’s recent work Juridical Humanity— reviewed here by Genevieve Renard Painter— provides an excellent complement to Fassin’s diagnosis of the role of senti- ment in producing and extending the ideal of a universal humanity: Esmeir traces how colonial technologies of law...

... pathbreaking intervention. On the pitfalls of the concept of “dehuman- ization” in particular, see Samera Esmeir, “On Making Dehumanization Possible,” pmla 121 (October 2006): 1544– 51. 4. I have adopted “being/knowing/feeling” from Sylvia Wynter, “On Dis- enchanting Discourse: ‘Minority...