Thresholds of Accusation

George Pavlich is H. M. Tory Chair and Professor in the Department of Sociology and the Faculty of Law at the University of Alberta. He has authored many books, co-edited several collections, and is widely published in leading journals. In 2022, he received the James Boyd Whyte Award from the Association of the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities.

• 1. Grammars of critique and colonial accusation; 2. Reconnaissance discourses for colonial law; 3. Sovereign spectacles and criminal accusation; 4. Justices of the peace at accusatory theatres; 5. Training police accusers; 6. Moulding accused individuals; 7. Biopolitics and colonial accusation; 8. Denouements and turned spades.

'George Pavlich has captured the power of law as a meaning-making enterprise, which in this case, was employed to create and sustain a national narrative to systematically dispossess Indigenous peoples from their lands. This complex disruption of Indigenous peoples' social, political, legal, and economic ordering was/is the dynamic of colonialism. What Pavlich has meticulously researched and articulates here is the 'how' of - a critical and practical insight into the depoliticizing of law as a colonial process. One of the beautiful things about this text is that its lessons apply today to the power relations that continue to ensnare and entangle Indigenous peoples. And, Pavlich is not a pessimist - because both history and the world are way too complex. Instead, he considers alternative ways to begin thinking about the operation of state law by drawing on Indigenous legal orders and legal practices. Truly a gift, and beautifully written to boot.' Val Napoleon, Law Foundation Chair of Indigenous Justice and Governance, University of Victoria