Representations of Justice in Modern and Contemporary Literature, Film and Theatre

This collection of essays gathers scholars from many different countries, communities and cultures. Across various art forms – drama, film, novel, poetry, virtual performance, long form drama series, installation and performance art – the reflective and critical writings of our contributors articulate how a diverse range of creative projects represent, respond and react to ideas of justice/injustice. Sometimes the evaluative focus is on a single piece of writing, sometimes it is on different works selected to afford critical dialogues across genres, time periods and cultures, sometimes it is on works that are adapted or re-contextualised and sometimes the essays are about using archives or real-life incidents as source materials.

If such works have historic, contemporary, or future oriented settings, genre and performance sensibilities complicate the direct relationship between texts and contexts. The essays here regularly regard artistic expression and reception as potential forms of activism, where artistic expression serves not just as a critique of or to offer insight about rights, freedoms, inequalities and injustices, but to encourage critical debate, respect differences, and to incite empathy, allyship, and solidarity. These essays demonstrate how aspirations and contradictions can often be simultaneously evident in creative expressions around justice.

Equally, artistic opposition to rampant inequities can be obvious and correct, while a tolerance and/or reinforcement of other discriminations, subtle or otherwise, are not to be ignored.1 Restorative justice is less of a concern, whereas distributive, criminal and social justice predominate.2 That said, the essays here demonstrate how complex it can be to make universal claims on human rights. This project was never intended as a collection of essays about politics, history, economics or the state of justice around the globe, rather the collection merely captures the various interventions that literature outputs and art practices, in whatever forms, can make.

Pedzisai Maedza’s essay deals with Art of Disruption presented at Iziko National Gallery South Africa (2016) by Dean Hutton, a genderqueer multimedia artist. Hutton’s mixed-media exhibition examined power and representation in post-apartheid South Africa. The essay outlines how South African artists who had previously challenged the racial segregation and apartheid were ‘routinely harassed, censored, intimidated, arrested, detained, killed, and in some cases forced into exile’ under a 1948 law. Hutton’s work gave rise to a major political backlash that included not just on and offline criticism but involved vandalism of the exhibition, attacks on gallery staff and legal challenges in the courts. Hutton’s artistic practices were influenced by student campus protests against fees, the need to decolonise the curriculum, and resistance towards the public statues that marked the formation and legacies of apartheid. The essay is marked by a forensic analysis of Magistrate Thulare’s judgement in the case taken against Hutton by complainants, The Cape Party. The grievances of White privilege under threat are afforded no validity by Thulare’s judgement, and by so doing, demonstrate how the courts had reformed so that to protect and secure racial justice.

Eugene McNulty’s essay deals with a trilogy of noir novels by Eoin McNamee, The Blue Tango (2000), Orchid Blue (2010) and Blue is the Night (2014). McNamee’s fictional worlds are inspired by real-life figures and complex criminal investigations in a period just before the eruption of ‘The Troubles’ (1968–98) in Northern Ireland. The central figure is Lancelot (Lance) Curran (1899–1984), who served as a High Court Judge, Attorney General and Stormont Parliamentarian, whose daughter, Patricia, was murdered in 1952, a case that gave rise to a miscarriage of justice. The literary Gothic generates unease about the machinations of justice. Legal narratives and the Gothic genre are combined to demonstrate the power, structures and ideologies of Unionism. The fictional worlds created across the trilogy not just identify the classed and sectarian nature of justice, but the machinations and collusions that operated behind the public expressions of legal objectivity, impartiality, and fairness, even more so when steered by an L. A. Noir sensibility. Political expediency and extra-judicial machinations have a particular and potent place in a divided state. Accordingly, McNulty examines issues of the law when it is haunted by absence, its own unconscious. The scales of justice are seldom neutral, when there is often a hand, invisible or otherwise, determining justice. Legal, judicial and penal systems can be shaped by a sectarian ideology.

Justine Zapin’s essay focuses on George Bernard Shaw’s obsessions with injustice in his dramatic works, across a career of seventy years. Although he was always concerned with law, morality and injustices, Shaw dramatises only four trials in over sixty plays, namely in The Devil’s Disciple (1897) which includes a military trial, the makeshift trial of a navy captain in Captain Brassbound’s Conversion (1900), the community trail endured by the American horse-thief in The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet (1909), and most famously, his account of Joan of Arc’s religious trial for heresy in Saint Joan (1923). The essay demonstrates that Shaw regards the law as class determined, and seldom impartial, and reminds the reader how Shaw, across his career, would champion divorce, women’s suffrage, oppose the ill treatment of prisoners and champion political independence for countries like Ireland. In reality, for Shaw, morality, law and justice possess a tenuous rather than a synergetic relationship.

Maha Alatawi’s essay not only outlines how in Haitian folklore the zombie figure serves as a symbol of social injustice and oppression, relative to experiences of slavery and colonisation, but that the zombie figure has evolved and taken on new meanings in modern literature and popular culture, especially in relation to social anxiety, mass consumerism, and concerns about global obliteration via pandemics. The argument is placed in the context of contemporary global capitalism more broadly. Alatawi explores how the Netflix series, All of Us Are Dead (2022), written by Chun Sung-Il and directed by Lee Jae-Kyoo Kim, and set in South Korea, deploys the terror of zombies by way of magnifying contemporary real-world horrors. Verbal and psychological bullying and peer to peer violence within a schooling system becomes the catalyst that unleashes a virus, prompted by scientific experimentation that results in so many unintended consequences. The essay distinguishes between survival and selfishness, co-operation and competitiveness, and notes that crises often incite a greater belief in altruism, solidarity, and common purpose. The series is fundamentally read in light of the recent COVID-19 epidemic and the geopolitical responses to such a tragedy, within the context of class injustices and political strategies that restrict and violate rather than support or console citizens. Crises and responses expose the baseline values of governments, and often these have little to do with justice or fairness.

Eva Urban’s essay considers the virtual performance of In Justice (2021), created by Raquel McKee, Rosa Stourac McCreery, and Michelle Ashwood Stewart in association with Terra Nova Productions, an intercultural theatre company based in Northern Ireland. The virtual production was available for free to anyone with digital access. This cross-cultural group of artists (Jamaica, Ireland, United Kingdom, and Canada) are seen as joining not just a contemporary but historic conversation. As Urban notes, with the usage of song, performed poetry, and creative choreography, the work’s intention is to target both historic and contemporary imperialistic practices. Discrimination, racism, and slavery are foregrounded by way of insisting on accountability, remorse and reparation. Intersectionality is foregrounded as a supporting critical framework.

Olfa Gandouz’s essay on Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape (1922), first focuses on second-generation human rights activism and the emphasis these activists gave to social and economic rights over political ones. O’Neil’s play is read in the context of Franklin Roosevelt’s Second Bill of Rights (1944), which expressed an essential need to address unemployment and poverty, and how social injustices corrupt societies. From O’Neill’s socialist perspective, trauma, over-work, the exploitation of labour, the dehumanisation of the working classes and intersectional socio-economic injustices impact on the dignity of his fellow citizens. Indignity fosters self-loathing, and little self-belief, ensuring that self-worth declines due to shame, denigration and prejudice. The essay deploys Amartya Sen’s ‘Capability Approach’ to justice – his response to John Rawls’s views on justice in A Theory of Justice. For Sen, governments must adopt policies that promote freedoms and opportunities, which empower citizens. Education is central to Sen’s views on changing inequality and injustices.

Samantha Cade’s essay offers an analysis of ANU’s site-specific verbatim production Staging the Treaty (2022), a piece performed in response to the Anglo-Irish Treaty debates of 1922, where pro-and anti-treaty sides argued in the Kevin Barry Room of the then University College Dublin (now the National Concert Hall) whether or not to accept an agreement that would accept the division of the island of Ireland. Because there was so much disagreement, the consequence was the horrific Civil War that followed (1922–23). These debates ran for over two weeks, and four hundred and forty thousand words were exchanged. The resulting 13-hour performance was scripted by Theo Dorgan. Cade, who also served as an Associate Director on the performance, notes the obligations of those involved with the production, on the one hand, to historic accuracy and political impartiality, and on the other, the editing, condensing, and interventions made, particularly the foregrounding of the contributions of women politicians to the debate itself. Dramatic licence jostles with the need for accuracy, pragmatism with the notion of authenticity, and immersing an audience in a re-telling of a historic event with the need to make the experience as engaging as possible. The ferocity and horrors of such political divisions and factional fighting have reverberated in terms of politics and justice for close to 100 years.

Peter Charleton’s essay looks at a series of Hollywood films through the lens of justice, and heroism. What makes this essay especially interesting is that Charleton takes the heroism of Cú Chulainn, an Irish figure of legend, whom he heard about growing up, as the starting point for his reflection. Accordingly, Irish folklore’s take on mythic heroism meets Hollywood’s responses to justice, by way of the reflections of a contributor who currently sits as a Supreme Court judge in Ireland. Such reflections accordingly offer particular and unique insights into nuanced issues of justice, the quest for truths and shared communal values, especially in light of courage, conviction, the defence of rights and the protections offered to the downtrodden and marginalised associated with fictional and folkloric heroes. Charleton mentions an extensive range of films, from Close Encounters of the Third Kind to Ran, from High Noon to Gran Torino, from The Bourne Identity to Flightplan. A folkloric hero can be initially ordinary or extraordinary, but in the face of adversity is endowed with courage, perseverance, and a sense of a mission that has justice as a core value. The essay also demonstrates how myths, fables and popular culture can variously imprint themselves on films. In the movies quest for the ‘eternal and universal’, notable is the observation that justice in real life is often best served by ‘mundane plodding’, but that ‘one may only plod towards justice if the system will bear movement towards what is right’.

Britta Olinder’s essay examines Sinéad Morrissey’s third collection of poems, The State of the Prisons (2005), particularly Morrissey’s focus on the eighteenth-century English prison reformer John Howard. Biographies by Leona Baumgartner and Martin Southwood inspire in part Morrissey’s work. How Morrisey negotiates details found in the records and biographies is enlightening. The poem is written in the first person, through which the reader hears Howard’s self-reflective voice. Howard had a spell in prison himself, when during a trip to Portugal he was taken captive by pirates and held in a French prison for four months before being exchanged for a French officer. His book, The State of Prisons would bring him a degree of fame. Howard offered practical and cheap solutions to rectify challenging conditions, proposing salaries for turnkeys and suggesting prisoners should get some payment so that they were able to pay off some of their fines. Indeed, Howard’s reforming work engendered two Acts of Parliament. Howard also looked into living conditions of workhouses, hospitals and other institutions not just in Britain, but also across Europe. Howard’s reforming zeal is also seen in the context of how he was absent for prolonged periods of his son’s life and was often overly severe with him. Olinder argues that for Howard, the issue of justice is not just a social justice/injustice one but is also connected to moral and spiritual justice.

Helena Young’s essay considers The Examination (2019), the work of Brokentalkers theatre company. This performance piece also looks at the penal system, but now in contemporary Ireland. Rather than focusing on the perpetrators of crime and the wrongdoings they committed, the work examines through a postdramatic lens, the daily experiences of those detained within the Irish prison system, how a custodial sentence and prison conditions impact on the mental health of those detained. An intimidating and inhospitable environment does little to ease the mental struggles of many inmates. The food offered is of poor quality and the practice of ‘slopping out’ – an emptying of human waste – is held up as a particularly egregious way of dealing with those detained, despite numerous reports that regard such practices as a breach of human rights. Drug addiction is also rampant in Irish jails and few prisoners have good outcomes in overcoming addictions, when very limited resources are allocated to aid their recovery. Moreover, poverty is a common factor amongst the prison population. The dramatic piece does not endeavour to diminish the consequences of criminal actions nor to deny the need for punishment and retribution, but to see those incarcerated in a more humane light, and that some have a capacity for remorse and to change, as the serve their sentence.

Looking at divorce, single parenting and families in conflict, Rachel Fehily’s essay considers three critically acclaimed films, Robert Benton’ Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), Lee Daniel’s Precious (2009), and Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story (2019). The essay profiles the class, race, gender and professions/occupations of the characters in each, the different ways that each film represents agents of the state, legal-council or the administrators of justice, and also the outcomes for children as a consequence of the fallout from breakups and single parenting. Kramer vs. Kramer captures the personal and career impact of single parenting on a father and a mother who can no longer stay in a dysfunctional relationship, and Marriage Story maps the co-parenting challenges faced by parents living on opposite coasts in America, New York and Los Angeles. If Benton and Baumbach’s filmic worlds have much in common, Daniel’s film, is very different, whereby parenting is shaped and informed by a very different set of racial, cultural and socio-economic intersectional markers and experiences. Clairece Precious Jones (the eponymous Precious) not only has a child with Down syndrome, a child that is the result of parental rape, but Precious is also oppressed by her abusive mother. Although she finds herself pregnant again, by the film’s end, educational training may be a good opportunity for Precious, affording her a degree of agency, but the socio-economic disadvantages she experiences situates her very differently to the female leads in the other two films.

Wahaj Unnisa Warda looks at the Hindu film, Mulk (2019), directed by Anubhav Sinha, by way of looking at Islamophobia and communal tensions in post-Partition India. Current polarisation in India is traced back to British colonisation and the partition in 1947 of Indian Dominion and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, which amounted to a crude and divisive partitioning of the subcontinent, and a reinforcement of a major Hindu/Muslim divide, as Warda argues. The 1973 Hindi movie, Garm Hava, directed by M. S. Sathyu is first analysed in order to demonstrate displacement, vilification and diminished prospects that minority Muslims faced in India after partition. The essay demonstrates how Mulk tackles the radicalism and death of a Muslim youth, whose death may be regarded as an extra-judicial killing. The essay argues that the film suggests that Islamophobia is not just a legacy issue but is effectively a denial of justice and, therefore, there is a right to be heard and an obligation to redress such inequalities.

Clara Mallon’s chapter examines Brokentalkers Theatre Company’s The Blue Boy (2011), Natural History of Hope (2016) – a collaboration between Fiona Whelan, Brokentalkers, and Rialto Youth Project – and Multi-Story’s The Apology (2022), through the lens of class-based injustice in Ireland’s neoliberal society in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The company is noted for blending documentary, mixed-media style theatre, with personal testimony. If The Blue Boy indicts the systematic abuse experienced by children and teenagers in Irish Industrial/Reformatory Schools, Natural History of Hope explores responses to class and gender oppressions, and The Apology foregrounds housing injustice. The essay’s focus is on the period of recession that followed the socio-economic advances made during the Celtic Tiger period (1993–2007), as well as addressing the increasing liberalisation of Ireland. Mallon argues that Ireland remains very much an unequal society, with societal structures leaving ‘the working class exploited, dehumanised, devalued, excluded, and marginalised’. In addition, Mallon argues that the demonisation of the working classes is prompted by the libertarian inclinations of neoliberalism, articulating how poor-blaming discourses exist not just in the media and in popular culture, but also in the theatre itself. However, theatrical performances can become sites of differentiation, articulation of and resistance towards inequality and injustices.

Eamonn Jordan’s essay looks at how some plays within the Irish theatrical tradition dramatise the different ways that characters interact, engage with, oppose, defy or benefit from the law. Plays by Marina Carr, Lady Augusta Gregory, Nancy Harris, John B. Keane, Deirdre Kinahan and Gerard Stembridge are discussed. In some instances, the administration of the law is associated with collusion, corruption and the protection of vested interests. On other occasions, the law is undermined by characters refusing to provide information that might lead to the solving of a crime. The essay notes that in very few instances are crimes adequately prosecuted. The implications of such failures of justice, dramaturgically perceived or otherwise, do not seem to be in line with how the majority of works written for screen and television upholds the sufficiency and supremacy of the procedures of justice. The essay wonders that when justice is neither done nor seen to be done if this is an oppositional stance towards the rule of law more broadly, a simplistic re-affirmation of a more historical resistance towards British Law, or a simplistic, reactionary dramaturgical shorthand? Although this tradition of plays may regularly fail to vindicate the criminal justice system, it is not necessarily to suggest that such writing wants its spectators to be dismissive or entirely distrusting of justice.

In a comparative essay that interrogates the recent Spanish film, Nowhere (2023), directed by Albert Pintó, and the novel A Mercy (2008) by the African American writer Toni Morrison, Fawziah Harshan deals with how contemporary art forms can foreground injustices and posit a belief in hope. Morrison’s A Mercy is set in seventeenth-century America, where a child is transferred from one slave owner to another in lieu of a debt. While the child has suffered, she has misconstrued her mother’s motivation, misreading her actions as abandonment. The mother knew that by getting her child away from one household she would not have to experience the sexual abuse that was systemic under their current living situation. However much the daughter has suffered by her relinquishment, she has gained by living with a more benign family. Morrison’s modifications of the genre of neo-slave narratives are carefully foregrounded in this essay. Pinto’s film world is beset by violation, persecution and the collapse of social norms in a future dystopian Spain. Resource shortages, a migrant refugee crisis, human trafficking, and massacres feature in a film that resists dystopian genre imperatives, which tend to offer as much bleakness, corruption and persecution as caution, submissiveness and limited resistance. Both the novel and film are united by their focus on mothers and babies and by choices made by characters that are complex and not simplistically heroic. From a justice perspective, each work rejects the notion of human flesh as a commodity, while prompting notions of hope and tenacity rather than nihilism or obliteration.

The final essay in the collection by Salomé Paul begins with reflections on Greek Tragedy, and moves the emphasis away from issues of fate, destiny, subjectivity and choice towards not just issues of justice, but towards conflictual or comparative systems of justice. Such rival systems of justice at root inspire fear and pity. If the traditional notion of catharsis seems to bring forward a reconciliation of sorts, the works discussed in Paul’s essay do not achieve that outcome. Instead, the irreconcilable is foregrounded in this argument in terms of barbarism, enslavement, sexual assault and the murder of the innocent. The essay’s focus is on newer versions of Hecuba’s fate in Euripides’ Trojan tragedies, Hecuba and The Trojan Women; the former was largely ignored in terms of theatre production, and the latter was staged far more frequently up to the 2000s. Jean-Paul Sartre’s version The Trojan Women (1965), was written in the aftermath of the Algerian War (1954–62), which led to the independence of Algeria from the French colonial empire. Here, colonisation is a fundamental and shameful injustice. Additionally, Paul argues that Sartre had the Indochina War (1946–54), Vietnam War (1955–75), and nuclear war also in mind while writing his anti-imperialist imperative text. Brendan Kennelly’s 1993 version of The Trojan Women is seen to foreground gender inequality, while Marina Carr’s Hecuba (2015), suggests the injustices done to Hecuba need to be rectified. Accordingly, it is argued that Carr’s text serves as a form of restorative justice, with Carr also pointing towards the recent war in Syria, and how Western powers allow such injustices to thrive.

However, the crossovers between artistic expressions, justice and the law are complex, obliging particularly nuanced glossing. As Alan Hanna and Eugene McNulty observe: ‘To speak of the connections between law and literature is to enter into a dialectical hall of mirrors that is perhaps as old as law and literature themselves’.3 All of us remain touched by the law in various ways; as Mark Fortier notes, as ‘[w]e live in societies crisscrossed by laws and legal understandings; almost any human story will find itself dealing with law, often in myriad ways—it takes only a little digging to undercover this’.4 Without falling for a mode of expression that links art and justice in some fundamental fashion, it is important to keep in mind Fortier’s remark that: ‘I have heard skeptics in the field of law question if literature really adds anything to the study and understanding of law over and above prodding a vague humanist sensitivity’.5

In addition, Fortier notes that in literature and art there are always both frictions and deficits, as: