Res Nulla Loquitur: A Multimedia Essay in Seven Parts is an experiment in the study of how sound decomposes the words of law. The sound recordings used here were taken from evidence collected during investigations into the deaths of Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, Jamar Clark, Terence Crutcher, Samuel Debose, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Walter Scott, and Alton Sterling. While legal interpretation of these recordings strip them of self-evidentiary meaning, their recomposed repetition here force an encounter with a form of evidence I call, res nulla loquitur, ‘the no-thing speaks.’ Their indestructible questions refuse to settle for and in whatever the law offers as justice.

 

Sora Han is the Chair of the Department of African American Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and an Associate Professor of the Culture & Theory Ph.D. Program, Criminology, Law & Society, Comparative Literature and the School of Law. Her first book, Letters of the Law (2015), extends the theoretical insights of critical race theory to produce new readings of American law’s landmark decisions on race and civil rights. She is also the co-author of the law casebook, Comparative Equality and Anti-Discrimination Law, Third Edition (2020), and Lacan and Chan Buddhist Thought (2022). Her newest book, Mu: 49 Marks of Abolition, to be published in 2022, is an experimental text on the poetics of the unconscious materiality of law in the wake of racial slavery. Recent publications on these new lines of research include ‘Slavery as Contract’, in Law and Literature (2016) and ‘Poetics of Mu’ in Textual Practice (2018). Her first book of poetry, ㅁ: to regard a wave, is forthcoming.

In English
Organized by

Christopher Chamberlin and Xenia Chiaramonte

KV The Case Sora Han

Image Credit © Claudia Peppel