Constitutional dictatorships, from colonialism to COVID-19

In this article, I use the concept of constitutional dictatorship as a heuristic, as a way of thinking more explicitly about constitutional violence than is customary in comparative constitutional law. Constitutional dictatorship is an epic concept. It is capable of illuminating-and retelling-epic histories of constitutional law, of alerting us to commonalities in constitutional practices of domination-and thus of violence-that would otherwise remain shrouded in legal orientalism. The analysis aspires to make constitutional law strange again. To this end, I trace nomoi and narratives of constitutional dictatorship from colonialism to the coronavirus pandemic. Arguing against emergency scripts, I relate the idea of "emergency" to the everyday and both to coloniality. Mine is a rudimentary conceptual history-a Begriffsgeschichte-of constitutional dictatorship. I think of the empirical vignettes about crisis government in the colony/postcolony on which my comparative historical analysis is based as prolegomena to a critical theory of constitutional dictatorship.