“A garden had been left to grow wild there”: considering nature in Ivan Vladislavić’s Johannesburg

Johannesburg has frequently been subjected to critical examinations that conceive the city as a metropolis dominated by late capitalist excess and gold mining hyperbole. Along these particular lines, much of the literary scholarship that considers Vladislavi?’s city texts have focussed on his conception of the built environment that critiques its exploitative extractive history and its simulacral tendencies. However, sustained critical attention of his treatment of nature in the urban space has largely been neglected or underplayed. The natural Highveld environment, for Vladislavi?, occupies a fraught and liminal space in the city, pushed to the margins of a brutalizing modernity. Nature in Johannesburg, he opines, is a construction, an imposition and inheritance that belies the city’s colonial and European settler history. However, there are moments in which, when human attention is turned away, nature in its untended and generative capacity works to unmake the structural obduracy of the settled city. This manifests in episodes that embrace the quiet potency of wild gardens that disrupt the urban status quo.     

Legal profession in Britain: The 1992 conundrum

In an era of change, the year 1992 will be significant for some lawyers while irrelevant to others. Among solicitors big City firms are prospering, but those who depend on legal aid feel the pinch. The Bar has long‐term problems. Many of these developments are irreversible, argues Marcel Berlins in an Article in the “Financial Times” written shortly before the Lord Chancellor's recent announcement of proposed reforms.     

The hundredth volume of the Law Reports of the Commonwealth

This article, written as a foreword to the hundredth volume of the Law Reports of the Commonwealth (LRC), celebrates the growing success of these law reports published since 1985. Generally appearing in four or five volumes each year, the reports collect some of the main cases, mostly from final courts, decided throughout the Commonwealth of Nations. With the demise of the Privy Council as an institutional link, the courts of the Commonwealth remain connected by the English language, a shared doctrinal and historical tradition, common legal taxonomies and a similar professional culture. The author pays special tribute to the excellent Cumulative Indexes from the 1980s to date; the insightful annual Editorial Reviews which draw attention to grand themes and trends throughout the Commonwealth in the LRCs; the outstanding work of the two foundation general editors Professor James Read and Dr. Peter Slinn; and the publishers Butterworths LexisNexis. In the place of imperial rule there is now a free sharing of knowledge in the law, as befits the free association of the Commonwealth of Nations.     

Freedom, Law, and the Colonial Project

In this essay I develop a Marxist-informed anticolonialist position, and from this position I assess the role of law in the early Canadian settler-state. I claim that the flexibility of law is a measure of its restitutive and exploitative facets, such facets that operate dialectically as a means of moderating between the settler-state’s liberal democratic ideals (e.g. individual freedom and enfranchisement) and its capitalist imperatives (e.g. privatization of land, expansion, and profit). Law plays an integral role in this context because, by performing this moderating function, it stabilizes the socio-economic order of the emergent settler-state. In the second half of this essay, I enrich my theoretical analysis by examining the variable legal subjectivity of early Ukrainian immigrants to Canada. This historical perspective allows me to illuminate the intricacies of the logic that informs law’s flexibility, and to show how the liberal democratic principle of freedom was—and continues to be—both extolled and compromised by the law’s moderating function.