How does the law obtain its space? Justice and racial difference in colonial law: British Honduras (Belize), 1821

How does the law come to have its space? How do certain social conflicts come to fall within the law? Joel Wainwright and Filiberto Penados will examine these questions through a discussion of Wainwright’s (2021) paper, “How does the law obtain its space? Justice and racial difference in colonial law” in International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 34(5). The paper analyses how law emerged in British Honduras (today, Belize) through a study of the first criminal trial prosecuted in the place now called southern Belize: a trial for the murder of an Indigenous woman by an enslaved Black man. Wainwright examines the trial record at two levels: first, as a primary source, to gather clues about the ethnohistory of the region; second, by drawing upon Greimas’s semiotic method, to argue that the law arrived as a mode of ordering space, bodies, and justice, realizing an immanent structure of racial difference.

Speakers

Joel Wainwright is a professor in the department of geography at Ohio State University, where he teaches about political economy, environmental change, and social theory. He is author of the books Decolonizing Development: Colonial Power and the Maya; Geopiracy: Oaxaca, Militant Empiricism, and Geographical Thought; Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of our Planetary Future (with Geoff Mann); and editor of Rethinking Israel-Palestine: Marxist Perspectives (with Oded Nir).

Filiberto Penados is Associate Professor and Research Director at Galen University, Belize. His work focuses on indigenous and critical education and development. He has a long history of working with indigenous organizations and communities including serving as president of the Central American Indigenous Council and adviser to Toledo Maya Leaders Alliance and Alcalde Association of Belize.

All welcome- this seminar is free to attend, but booking is required.