Diplomatic Para-citations

Taking seriously the critical conception of diplomacy as the mediation of estrangement, Diplomatic Para-citations turns to the politics and laws that tie modern diplomacy to colonial cultures and the ‘genres of Man’ that they privilege. In an attempt to read ‘the diplomatic’ from the African postcolony, the book probes the injunction at the center of the law of genre that states that “genres are not to be mixed.” This enables it to investigate the citational/recitational forms of knowledge and p