In Literature, Law, and Rhetorical Performance in the Anticolonial Atlantic, Anne W. Gulick traces a long history of Black transatlantic anticolonial legal imaginative engagements with the newly emergent genres of first world law. She argues that anticolonial experimentation with first world legal genres, especially in the wake of decolonization in the Caribbean and Africa, was instrumental to the emergence of a distinctly declarative juridico-political genre that dates back to the North Atlantic revolutionary declarations. Anchoring her study on this transatlantic history of declarative genres, she mines an expansive archive of juridico-political texts: from Haiti’s early-nineteenth-century founding texts to the late-twentieth-century postcolonial texts in Africa. At stake in this book is the need to unravel how these postcolonial declarative texts “undertake subversive experiments with First World state and international legal forms” (1). The book, therefore, reveals how anticolonial legal texts draw from first world legal texts while at the same time subverting and displacing them in form and content, thus radically transforming the emergent genres of first world law. With this book, Gulick joins a growing number of critics (such as Joseph Slaughter and Elizabeth Anker) who investigate the link between law and postcoloniality.

The book begins by sketching a Black Atlantic legal history, starting with the independence of the first Black nation-state in 1804. Bringing Haiti’s declaration of independence in 1804 and its 1805 constitution in conversation with North Atlantic legal forms, the first chapter argues that through a rhetorical engagement with first world legal genres, Haiti’s declarative texts put forth “an alternative vision of the meaning of legal authorship and authority” (17) not just for Haiti but for the postcolonial Black nation-states yet to come. The question of anticolonial legal imaginative writings’ rhetorical engagements with and reinvention of first world legal forms extends to the next two chapters. C. L. R. James’s and Aimé Césaire’s anticolonial writings form the basis for critical discussion in chapters 2 and 3, respectively. Offering a scintillating critique of these writers’ anticolonial visions, she contends that anticolonial imaginative writing played a vital role in anticolonial thought in the wake of decolonization, “first as a mode of critiquing the colonial past and present, and second as a means of articulating visions of postcolonial future on the horizon” (79).

One can neatly divide the book into two parts, with the foregoing chapters (i.e., chapters 1–3) forming the first part. Part 2 of the book (beginning from chapter 4) turns to African anticolonial thought. Taking the 1955 South African Freedom Charter as a springboard—and extending to Kenya’s and Algeria’s constitutional experiments in the next chapter—Gulick argues that these texts’ betrayal of anticolonial vision is not (and should not be read as) a failure of the anticolonial project but as “a vital reminder that the anticolonial project is not yet complete” (123). Rejecting a teleological narrative and a rigid periodization of anticolonial history, she posits that decolonization is better envisioned as a long and incomplete process that continues even in our postcolonial present, a point she reaffirms in her just-published article.Footnote ¹ The anticolonial project, therefore, does not end with decolonization. The struggle for emancipation continues even after political independence in the transatlantic postcolonial world. Gulick’s extraordinary critical skill shines brightest in the second part of the book. The book’s brilliant insights and innovative contribution to postcolonial studies are a testament to her claim (per Joseph Slaughter) that literature and law are “mutually constitutive fields in the postcolonial world” and that reading literary and legal archives comparatively can serve “as a powerful interpretive tool for postcolonial studies” (11).

Importantly, Gulick invites scholars to rethink what is often called anticolonialism’s failure in the anticolonial Black Atlantic. Though she is aware of the inability of the newly independent state’s legal texts and institutions to “reconfigure colonial economic and political power relations” following decolonization (1), she opines that the obsession with narratives of failure in postcolonial studies has occluded the possibilities of critically examining the various successes of anticolonial movement. Gulick, to be clear, is not opposed to underscoring the fact that the emancipatory dreams of anticolonialism were betrayed across the Black Atlantic, but she is uncomfortable when such narrative becomes “an automatic and shorthand account of how postcolonial studies frames the relationship between the anticolonial past and the post-independent present” (5). Besides, the narrative of anticolonialism’s failure is not unconnected to the hitherto canonized linear history of anticolonialism, which declares the movement’s end once decolonization began. Gulick punctures this teleological account of anticolonial history, arguing that for postcolonial studies to regain traction as a viable critical tool for understanding the postcolonial world, the field needs more robust engagement with the anticolonial past. Our postcolonial present, she contests, “calls for more engagement with the anticolonial past, not less” (6). Literature, Law, and Rhetorical Performance in the Anticolonial Atlantic thus argues for the centrality of anticolonial critique to our postcolonial present.

My discussion of the book so far foregrounds it as a remarkable contribution to the embattled field of postcolonial studies. But though the author does not explicitly attend to this, her approach and arguments also have vital implications for global Black studies (not less for postcolonial studies as well). Following what she calls Paul Gilroy’s “transversal reading practice,” Gulick transcends traditional regional and national frames in the study of Black history and postcolonial studies in general. Rather, she favors what she calls a “reflective and capacious comparative methodology” in the study of anticolonial transatlantic Black, evident in the diverse genres and expansive archives that she submits to critical analysis. In her poignant comparative study of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Édouard Glissant in the final chapter, for instance, she gestures toward the urgent need for postcolonial scholarship to transcend the geographical and linguistic divide between Anglophone and Francophone Africa. The time has come—and Gulick makes this clear—for postcolonial studies to bridge this divide, but it must do more by extending this comparative approach to the Anglophone, Francophone, Lusophone, and Arabophone transatlantic postcolonial world.