@article{2024:quirogavillamarn:arminius_r,
title = {Arminius Rex: On the Postcolonial Uses of Imperial Languages in, and beyond, International Law},
year = {2024},
note = {Despite its aspirational name, our discipline has slowly come to
understand that ‘international’ law is anything but international.
Increasingly, new waves of scholarship have dissected the famous image
of the ‘invisible college’, revealing many of its implicit biases
and hierarchies in terms of gender, race, or nationality. A promising
example of this is the recent surge of interventions that question
international law’s Anglo- or Franco-centric past, present, and
future. This rising chorus of voices challenge the relevance of French
or highlight the violence involved in making English a global lingua
franca. While one can sympathise with this critique from a
postcolonial perspective, I have grown increasingly wary that some of
these contributions end up pleading for an essentialist understanding
of local languages in their quest to undermine imperial tongues.
Instead, in this essay, I draw from the Germano-Roman mythical figure
of Arminius to reflect on the postcolonial uses of imperial languages.
Instead of reclaiming the vernacular, I suggest that critical and
postcolonial international legal scholars can strategically inherit
the legacies of hegemonic languages for anticolonial purposes. Just as
Arminius drew from Latin and Rome, the Négritude movement siphoned
from French – and even Postcolonial Studies were themselves forged
in the crucible of British rule over Egypt and India. We too, I argue,
can attempt to use the master’s tools to dismantle his house, at
least temporarily.},
journal = {Zeitschrift für ausländisches öffentliches Recht und Völkerrecht / Heidelberg Journal of International Law},
pages = {281--306},
author = {Quiroga-Villamarín, Daniel R.},
volume = {84},
number = {2}
}