Turntablism in the History of International Law

Jean d'Aspremont (1)

1 EdD - École de Droit de Sciences Po (Sciences Po)

This chapter uses the metaphor of turntablism to shed light on the confinement of international lawyers' engagement with history to the terms, vocabularies, and categories of the very historical narratives they seek to evaluate, disrupt, or displace. For the sake of this chapter, turntablism is understood here as the art of creating new music and sound effects by using one or several turntables on which a record is placed. This chapter argues that twenty-first century international lawyers engaging with the history of international law are talented turntablists in that the many historiographical works of international lawyers produced since the so-called 'historical turn' have remained confined to the very terms, categories, and vocabularies of the histories whose creation they have been discoursing and theorising. This chapter ultimately shows that turntablism is not the inevitable fate of international lawyers engaging with history, and that a radical historical critique is possible and should be promoted.

Mots clés: international law; history; historiography; critique; critical legal studies; critical histories; colonialism; Eurocentricism

Domaines: Droit

Jean d'Aspremont. Turntablism in the History of International Law. Raphael Schäfer; Anne Peters. Politics and the Histories of International Law : The Quest for Knowledge and Justice, Brill Nijhoff, pp.405-429, 2021, 9789004461796. ⟨10.1163/9789004461802_017⟩. ⟨hal-03971145⟩