NEWS
Monday, December 1, 2014 3
Community Interrupted: Toward a Less
Constitutional Constitutionalism
An interview with Stacey Douglas
michael capitano › news editor
O
n nov ember 12, 2014, Stacy Douglas,
assistant professor at Carleton University
and constitutional scholar, visited Osgoode
Hall Law School as part of the Law.Art.
Culture Colloquium Series. She presented on the
problem that constitutions, often considered to be
the primary devices with which to construct new
political communities, have a tendency to conflate
the everyday management of populations with the
vast horizons of political possibilities. Her legal interests are motivated by broad questions about theories
of democracy, the role of the state, the relationship
between government and the governed, and processes
of decolonisation.
Currently, she is tackling issues related to monumentalizing the constitution and the need for counter-monumental memorializing in order to interrupt
constitutional “fetishizing” and decentre the constitution in the political community. Her research focus
is on exploring
ways to un-think
the hegemony of
the liberal subject
in the sovereign
community, and
looking to the museum as a possible place that can
function as an external site where radical reflexivity
is possible. Prior to her presentation, I had the opportunity to interview Stacy to explore what inspired her
research, and the importance of writing the interruption to transform the political community.
S: That’s a good question. I talk about it in a lot of
different ways in my work. The most succinct way
I can put it is that both museums and constitutions
are sites where imaginations of political communities are launched. They both tell stories about who
belongs and who doesn’t belong. They both tell stories about the kind of parameters of community and
jurisdiction. And they do that in numerous ways. One
example is the use of time—specifically teleological
time—the use of linear time to anchor their imaginations of the political.
Crucially, however, even though museums and
constitutions have these similarities, I also argue that
museums can do things that constitutions cannot and
that difference is important. Different kinds of constitutional theorists have tried making the constitution reflexive; what I say there is that the attempt to
do so, especially about their boundaries and borders,
is not possible. Constitutions delimit; that is what
they do. If it’s not delimiting political community or
claiming to then it’s not a constitution; it has to have
a body politic to
found itself.
Museums, even
though they have
this long history
of also delimiting in this way, can actually undo that by adopting
counter-monumental memorializing practices. This
term, I borrow from South African scholars; they have
written a lot about their relatively new constitution
(1996), and on the problematic ways it is lauded as a
quick fix for the