Authorial Labour in the Postcolonial Historiography of International Law

Abstract The article draws on the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan to offer an alternative reading of three texts that exemplify a postcolonial trend in the historiography of international law. These texts are Antony Anghie’s 2005 Imperialism, Sovereignty, and International Law ; Rose Parfitt’s 2019 The Process of International Legal Reproduction ; and Luis Eslava, Michael Fakhri, and Vasuki Nesiah’s introduction to the 2017 volume Bandung, Global History, and International Law . Disregarding the merits of the historical accounts they offer, the article draws on these text to show ( i ) that postcolonial historiographers of international law construct their own authorial selves as they reconstruct the past; and ( ii ) that this procedure, which is informed by desire, turns every (postcolonial) history into a personal history.