UC Riverside

My dissertation, States of Revolution: Language Beyond the Rhetoric of International Law in Arabic and Francophone Literature, describes the conditions, situations and poetics that are not spaces of identification and security, but deviance and multiplicity. It demonstrates how the law creates stories “discursive violence” to establish self-same communities. Poetics are the capacity of difference and immeasurable justice. The dissertation main questions are the relationship between international law and colonialism, the stories international law invented to justify the colonial enterprise and to create a self-determined subject and the unified community and how it conceptualized justice as based on right. The work explores the language international law uses to manufacture histories and how this language converges with Orientalist and colonial literature. Through the reading and analysis of geographically disparate literary texts, the dissertation underscores how native post-colonial texts challenge the rhetoric of international law not by directly responding to the language of the law, but by creating subject and communities that cannot be incorporated or dominated and by framing the question of justice outside the legal codes that can always be interpreted at the convenience of individuals. To answer those questions and concerns, I examine legal philosophy texts to show the rhetoric use by international against the colonize to justify racism, exclusion and dehumanization of the natives and to clearly highlight the relationship between colonialism and international law by looking at specific colonial courts’ arguments, and applications of the law in different colonial contexts like Algeria, Lebanon and Palestine. An analysis of three literary works follows to present the instability and incompleteness of individual identities, a constantly changing community, and a form of justice that demands an ethical responsibility from the other, not a justice that can be measured by legal codes only. The significance of this dissertation is that it exposes the reality of international law and its foundation in rationalizing control and authority over others and the dangers of relying on an inherently colonizing system of codes to bring freedom, justice and rights to the ex-colonized. It highlights embracing the other and recognizing that difference and diversity enrich.