Description
The contributors, who include both historians and anthropologists, address instances of colonial violence from the early modern period to the twentieth century and from Asia to Africa to North America. They consider diverse topics, from the interactions of race, law, and violence in colonial Louisiana to British attempts to regulate sex and marriage in the Indian army in the early nineteenth century. They examine the political dilemmas raised by the extensive use of torture in colonial India and the ways that British colonizers flogged Nigerians based on beliefs that different ethnic and religious affiliations corresponded to different degrees of social evolution and levels of susceptibility to physical pain. An essay on how contemporary Sufi healers deploy bodily violence to maintain sexual and religious hierarchies in postcolonial northern Nigeria makes it clear that the state is not the only enforcer of disciplinary regimes based on ideas of difference.
Contributors. Laura Bear, Yvette Christianse, Shannon Lee Dawdy, Dorothy Ko, Isaac Land, Susan O'Brien, Douglas M. Peers, Steven Pierce, Anupama Rao, Kerry Ward
Historians and anthropologists address instances of colonial violence from the early modern period to the twentieth century to illuminate the relationship between violence and difference underlying modern governmental powers
About the Author
Steven Pierce is Lecturer in Colonial and Postcolonial History at the University of Manchester. He is the author of Farmers and the State in Colonial Kano: Land Tenure and the Legal Imagination.
Anupama Rao is Assistant Professor of History at Barnard College. She is the editor of Gender and Caste: Contemporary Issues in Indian Feminism and a coeditor of Violence, Vulnerability, and Embodiment.
Reviews
"Discipline and the Other Body offers a brilliant and multifaceted exploration of the ways in which colonial power worked with the human body. Covering a great variety of colonial contexts, the contributors bring to light the connections between what Michel Foucault called biopower and the lived experience of colonial violence."-Timothy Mitchell, author of Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity
"Here, finally, is a collection that forces us to think broadly and comparatively about the relationship between colonial power and the body, about the very interventions and invasions that made colonialism so embodied a practice. This volume will allow people like myself to teach colonialism in a way that bridges culture, politics, and gender in powerful ways."-Luise White, author of Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa
Book Information
ISBN 9780822337430
Author Anupama Rao
Format Paperback
Page Count 368
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 517g