Authorial Labour in the Postcolonial Historiography of International Law

Abstract

The article draws on the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan to offer an alternative reading of three texts that exemplify a postcolonial trend in the historiography of international law. These texts are Antony Anghie’s 2005 Imperialism, Sovereignty, and International Law; Rose Parfitt’s 2019 The Process of International Legal Reproduction; and Luis Eslava, Michael Fakhri, and Vasuki Nesiah’s introduction to the 2017 volume Bandung, Global History, and International Law. Disregarding the merits of the historical accounts they offer, the article draws on these text to show (i) that postcolonial historiographers of international law construct their own authorial selves as they reconstruct the past; and (ii) that this procedure, which is informed by desire, turns every (postcolonial) history into a personal history.