In a bid to promote consensus, this response article parses the subtle difference of meaning and emphasis that subsists between the various proponents of the new paradigm of legal capacity by closely reading four articles included in this issue of the Journal.

In this introduction to the special issue, “Postcolonial Reading Publics,” Mukherjee charts the history of reception of two texts, one a Bengali novel published in British India, the other a Shakespeare adaptation staged in twenty-first-century Kolkata, to examine the fortuitous ways in which reading publics baffle or exceed authorial intention and the given text’s addressable objects. Offering summaries of and continuities among the four essays that constitute the volume, the introduction ends with an analysis of the salience of this discursive context for postcolonial writing, theory, and critique in a world literary frame.

Over the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century, colonial observers repeatedly recorded Afro-Caribbean spiritual practices in the French Caribbean. “Ritual Observances” charts four such records; the 1698 journal of Jean Baptiste Labat, trial records from 1784, Moreau de-Saint Merie’s 1794 Description Topographique, and Drouin De Bercy’s De Saint Domingue. Although these records span distinct historical periods and textual mediums, they all employ a set of recognizable forms to express the convergence of disgust and desire that have historically attended colonial observations of Afro-Caribbean agency. I argue, however, that the significance of this ambivalence is constitutive of the historical moment in which it appears and that these observations are connected by more than a “shared” ambivalence. Instead, we might categorize these records as themselves ritualistic. The term ritual observance gestures to the act of observing a ritual, but also the way in which the observation is itself ritualistic. The repeated and sequential forms, or “actions” as I term them, of the ritual observance work to inscribe a legible history over the turbulence of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French colonialism.

People with disabilities continue to experience a disproportionately high level of state intervention in their private lives. Many disabled people's organisations have long sought to challenge this discriminatory approach and, in recent times, have relied upon the provisions of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in support of their claims. In this paper, we argue for the abolition of disability-specific legal bases for state intervention in the private lives of adults. We also argue for the introduction of a narrower disability-neutral legislative framework for state intervention in the lives of all adults – based on risk of imminent and serious harm to the individual's life, health or safety, while providing greater respect for the person's legal capacity as expressed through her will and preferences.

From the 1960s to the 1990s, the corrupt building contractor was a stock-villain of Bombay cinema. He was, this article argues, emblematic of crony capitalism prior to the liberalization of the Indian economy. This filmic role was, however, foreshadowed by his depiction as cynical accomplice and profiteer of British rule in fiction of the early and mid-twentieth century. Furthermore, the figure’s ultimate origins lie in colonial literature, in which he is often identified as a threat to the British civilian community that nourished itself with the ideal of its disinterested civilizing mission. This article traces the genealogy of the contractor-as-villain in fiction and film, demonstrating a continuity of themes, and persistence of concerns, across the work of Rudyard Kipling, Flora Annie Steel, Premchand, R. K. Narayan, and Mahasweta Devi. Using historical sources to contextualize these texts, it will also suggest possible explanations for the ubiquity of contractors in the Indian economy.

This essay reads Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantánamo Diary (2015) as an exemplary occasion to stage the dilemmas of postcolonial reading in the present, especially in relation to the global War on Terror declared by the United States after the 9/11 attacks. Reading Guantánamo Diary in relation to a genre it clearly seems to echo—the African American slave narrative—the essay argues that the analogy to slavery enables a deeper sense of the multiple and overlapping histories of race and empire but also obscures the transnational geography of detention signaled by Slahi as well as his damning comment on the failed project of postcolonial sovereignty. Showing how attention to questions of genre and their circulation across the globe illuminates the politics of terror and detention, the essay elaborates the possible ethics and aesthetics of postcolonial reading in the present.

This reflection responds primarily to the papers on legal agency and state intervention, with brief comments on the two other papers. The concept of transformative equality, developed in jurisprudence under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), can promote a deeper understanding of the rights of persons with disabilities.1 In particular, it is useful to address power relations between disabled and non-disabled persons not only with respect to family members and medical professionals, but also in the institutions of law and the state.

This article recuperates the creative work of Jamaican cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter, arguing that her activities as a dramatist and translator constitute foundational efforts to imagine an emerging postcolonial reading public. The article considers Wynter’s heretofore-neglected adaptation of Federico García Lorca’s La Casa De Bernarda Alba. The play appears in the newly founded Jamaica Journal in 1968, alongside an essay theorizing adaptation, production, and sets. Adaptation, for Wynter, is strategy of postcolonial reading that requires careful reinterpretation, an emphasis on historicity, and sensitivity to the imperatives of theatricality. The play evidences Wynter’s concern with the politics and poetics of translation, a transformative act that exemplifies the process of indigenization theorized in her later works. Wynter transforms Lorca’s original, “transposing” it to a Jamaican setting and adding dialogue and content to craft a scathing meditation on the legacies of colonialism. Published shortly after Jamaican independence in 1962, this play imagines a “truly indigenous theatre” as central to the formation a postcolonial public.

Article 12 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has created a revolution in legal-capacity law reform. It protects the right to exercise legal agency for people with disabilities with more clarity than any prior human rights instrument. This paper explores what constitutes an exercise of legal agency and what exactly Article 12 protects. It proposes a definition of legal agency and applies it to the lived experience of cognitive disability. It also uses a republican theory of domination to argue that people with cognitive disabilities who are experiencing domination are forced to assert legal agency in even daily decision-making because of the high level of external regulation of their lives and the ever-present threat of others substituting their decision-making. It identifies Article 12 as a tool for protecting such exertions of legal agency and curtailing relationships of domination.

Many constitutional questions in Israel are dealt with through the lens of the nation-state paradigm where the state is constitutionally associated with an ethnically and religiously defined majority group. Thus, many of the challenges that face Israeli society and the legal system are often presented as a result of an exceptionally antagonistic majority–minority relationship in a nation-state. This paper offers a novel way of analysing the Israeli constitutional regime using the framework of settler-colonialism. It argues that adding the settler-colonial lens will help better understand many features of Israeli constitutional law. Drawing on theoretical frameworks developed by theorists of colonialism, the paper explores a number of foundational aspects of Israeli constitutional law and demonstrates how they were shaped, and continue to be shaped, by settler-colonialism. The paper argues that settler-colonialism is one of the central features that animate Israeli constitutional law.

This essay on The Remains of the Day and modes of reading takes as its starting point the novel’s historical setting of July 1956, which coincides with the beginning of the Suez crisis. Although the crisis never explicitly registers in the narrative, various moments of imperial affirmation and anxiety suggest that it may have the status of a symptom. I read with and against this supposition. In the essay’s first section, I show how the repression of imperial crisis in Stevens’s narrative is entangled with his memories of fascist appeasement and complicity. Prompted by the text’s pervasive and self-conscious interest in Freudian figures of memory—its untimeliness and displacements—the second part argues that The Remains of the Day incorporates the symptom as an aesthetic and historical strategy in order to itself theorize a postcolonial symptomatology. The novel thus helps us complicate the proposition that symptomatic reading is something critics do to texts and suggests, in its allegory of symptomatic reading, the contours of a postcolonial interpretive method.