Honni Van

Liberal political philosophy emphasizes the benefits of membership in a cultural group and, in the opinion of this challenging book, neglects its harmful, oppressive aspects. Andrew Kernohan argues that an oppressive culture perpetuates inegalitarian social meanings and false assumptions about who is entitled to what. Cultural pollution harms fundamental interests in self-respect and knowledge of the good and is diffuse, insidious, and unnoticed. This cultural pollution is analogous to environmental pollution, and though difficult to detect, is nonetheless just as real. The book's conclusion is that a liberal state committed to the moral equality of persons must accept a strong role in reforming our cultural environment.

The three texts addressed in this review essay challenge us to question and creatively re-imagine the representation of material spaces at the centre of the colonial project: oceans, islands, ships and archives. Elizabeth McMahon deconstructs the island and its metaphorics, charting the relationship of geography, politics and literature through the changing status of islands, as imagined by colonists, beginning in the Caribbean and ending in Australia. Renisa Mawani destabilises colonial geography by re-animating the ocean and presents, amongst others, the ship and the ocean, as both method and juridical form. Writing against the ‘free sea’, Mawani addresses the imperial reliance on control of the ocean and the intensive juridification of the sea. Stewart Motha re-imagines law’s aggressive acts of adjudication, and challenges its originary fictions by exploring the logic, aesthetics and violence of legal processes that preserve and disavow the past at the same time. Each monograph considers the imaginaries, fictions and material geographies of colonialism, alongside how these imaginaries have been used as sites of counter-claim and resistance by those subjected to their technologies.

2012 marks the 80th anniversary of Donoghue v Stevenson, a case that is frequently cited as the starting-point for a genealogy of negligence. This genealogy starts with the figure of the neighbour, from which, as Jane Stapleton eloquently describes, a “golden thread” of vulnerability runs into the present (Stapleton 2004, 135). This essay examines the harms made visible and invisible through the neighbour figure, and compares the law’s framework to Virginia Woolf’s subtle re-imagining and theorisation of responsibility in her novel Mrs. Dalloway (1925). I argue that Woolf critiques and supplements the law’s representations of suffering. Woolf was interested in interpreting harms using a framework of neighbourly responsibility, but was also critical of the kinds of proximities recognised by society. Woolf made new harms visible within a framework of proximity: in this way, we might think of Woolf’s work as theorizing a feminist aesthetic of justice, and as providing an alternate genealogy of responsibility to Donoghue v Stevenson