New online from Law and History Review: Potential Legal History in the Art of Sonny Liew by Benjamin Goh, National University of Singapore:
Photographs, much less comic books, are not often seen to be focal sources of legal-historical research. This is so despite the growing momentum in the humanities and social sciences to take the visuality of culture, history, and law seriously. Notwithstanding the “visual turn” in law and humanities and socio-legal studies, it remains quite rare for legal history journals to carry images for the close reading of their pertinent implications. For the most part, legal scholarship has continued to exclude much of the optical media that arrange and compose the history of law, including the textual documents whose visuality produces, even contests, foundational legal concepts. This omission calls for intervention, not because legal history has failed to engage critically with dominant histories and the legal orders that they sustain, but rather because archived photographs and their (re)entry into visual modes of storytelling expand the range of historical sources that facilitate such critical projects. More fundamentally, the remediated photograph discloses the technological and theoretical assumptions of history-writing, prompting reflection on how far legal history should evolve to accommodate insights from its neighboring fields.
--Dan Ernst
