Description
Law and violence are thought to share an antithetical relationship in postcolonial modernity. Violence is considered the other of law, lawlessness is understood to produce violence, and law is invoked and deployed to undo the violence of lawlessness. Violent Modernities uses a critical legal perspective to show that law and violence in the New India share a deep intimacy, where one symbiotically feeds the other. Researched and written between 2008 and 2018, the chapters study the cultural sites of literature, cinema, people's movements, popular media and the university to illustrate how law's promises of emancipation and performances of violence live a life of entangled contradictions. The book foregrounds reparative and ethical accounts where law does not only inhabit courtrooms, legislations and judgments, but also lives in the quotidian and minor practices of disobediences, uncertainties, vulnerabilities, double binds and failures. When the cultural lives of law are reimagined as such, the book argues, the violence at the foundations of modern law in the postcolony begins to unravel.
About the Author
Sircar is Associate Professor, Jindal Global Law School, Sonepat, Haryana
Reviews
This is a book of dazzling erudition [that is] not channeled into the disinterested pursuit of critique as enlightenment, but a constant questioning of the theorist as activist, and the activist as theorist... Violent Modernities in chapter after chapter [is] an expression of love as a brawl with law for space-the space to invoke, listen to and perform law differently-in a quest marked by grace and daring. * Vasuki Nesiah, Professor of Practice, New York University, USA (from the foreword) *
This is a book of dazzling erudition [that is] not channeled into the disinterested pursuit of critique as enlightenment, but a constant questioning of the theorist as activist, and the activist as theorist... Violent Modernities in chapter after chapter [is] an expression of love as a brawl with law for spac--the space to invoke, listen to and perform law differently--in a quest marked by grace and daring. * Vasuki Nesiah, Professor of Practice, New York University, USA *
One of the things that I have enjoyed and learned from the book is that Sircar's work brilliantly brings together a range of cutting-edge theoretical conversations on law, to shed light on our contemporary cultural-governmental landscape. The aim of the book seems to be more of engaging the difficulty and thinking through complexity itself, rather than arriving at a 'successful' explanatory schema. This aspect of the book, moving back and forth from a subject position of scholar/activist in the field of legal/cultural history to a subject position of progressive experiential political subject with the consciousness and limitations of its own history makes the work more interesting and thoughtful in terms of the experimenting with the formal structure and style of the work. * Parthasarathi Muthukkaruppan, Law and Other Things *
Oishik Sircar writes beautifully, drawing from a wide range of themes and literature that is truly admirable. The book... invokes a daunting amount of theory from various fields. My idea of the empirical was vastly expanded as Sircar deals with a host of data, both primary and secondary: legal history, survivor testimonies and visual archives as primary sources and a humungous amount of reading of secondary literature... [It is a] disturbing but dazzling book. * Mohan Rao, The Biblio *
[Violent Modernities] presents an engaging account of law as the conduit of violence against the liberal accounts of law that often negate these realities... [The book] is an important contribution to not only critical legal scholarship on violence and modernity (where writings from within the discipline of law are rarer than they should be), but also an interesting insight into the growth of [Sircar's] ideas through time and shifting locations. * Nikita Sonavane and Jasoon Chelat, Economic and Political Weekly *
[Violent Modernities] documents meticulously that law was a central terrain where the promises of liberalism either remained unrealised or were, in fact, realised only to reveal that they entailed more violence and exclusion than its exponents assumed [...] Written from a left-critical perspective... the book is of interest both to those working on India and its law and to those thinking about the relationship between law and the global resurgence of the far right. * Ntina Tzouvala, Radical Philosophy *
Book Information
ISBN 9780190127923
Author Oishik Sircar
Format Hardback
Page Count 370
Imprint OUP India
Publisher OUP India
Weight(grams) 464g
Dimensions(mm) 221mm * 146mm * 24mm
About the Author
Sircar is Associate Professor, Jindal Global Law School, Sonepat, Haryana
Reviews
This is a book of dazzling erudition [that is] not channeled into the disinterested pursuit of critique as enlightenment, but a constant questioning of the theorist as activist, and the activist as theorist... Violent Modernities in chapter after chapter [is] an expression of love as a brawl with law for space-the space to invoke, listen to and perform law differently-in a quest marked by grace and daring. * Vasuki Nesiah, Professor of Practice, New York University, USA (from the foreword) *
This is a book of dazzling erudition [that is] not channeled into the disinterested pursuit of critique as enlightenment, but a constant questioning of the theorist as activist, and the activist as theorist... Violent Modernities in chapter after chapter [is] an expression of love as a brawl with law for spac--the space to invoke, listen to and perform law differently--in a quest marked by grace and daring. * Vasuki Nesiah, Professor of Practice, New York University, USA *
One of the things that I have enjoyed and learned from the book is that Sircar's work brilliantly brings together a range of cutting-edge theoretical conversations on law, to shed light on our contemporary cultural-governmental landscape. The aim of the book seems to be more of engaging the difficulty and thinking through complexity itself, rather than arriving at a 'successful' explanatory schema. This aspect of the book, moving back and forth from a subject position of scholar/activist in the field of legal/cultural history to a subject position of progressive experiential political subject with the consciousness and limitations of its own history makes the work more interesting and thoughtful in terms of the experimenting with the formal structure and style of the work. * Parthasarathi Muthukkaruppan, Law and Other Things *
Oishik Sircar writes beautifully, drawing from a wide range of themes and literature that is truly admirable. The book... invokes a daunting amount of theory from various fields. My idea of the empirical was vastly expanded as Sircar deals with a host of data, both primary and secondary: legal history, survivor testimonies and visual archives as primary sources and a humungous amount of reading of secondary literature... [It is a] disturbing but dazzling book. * Mohan Rao, The Biblio *
[Violent Modernities] presents an engaging account of law as the conduit of violence against the liberal accounts of law that often negate these realities... [The book] is an important contribution to not only critical legal scholarship on violence and modernity (where writings from within the discipline of law are rarer than they should be), but also an interesting insight into the growth of [Sircar's] ideas through time and shifting locations. * Nikita Sonavane and Jasoon Chelat, Economic and Political Weekly *
[Violent Modernities] documents meticulously that law was a central terrain where the promises of liberalism either remained unrealised or were, in fact, realised only to reveal that they entailed more violence and exclusion than its exponents assumed [...] Written from a left-critical perspective... the book is of interest both to those working on India and its law and to those thinking about the relationship between law and the global resurgence of the far right. * Ntina Tzouvala, Radical Philosophy *
Book Information
ISBN 9780190127923
Author Oishik Sircar
Format Hardback
Page Count 370
Imprint OUP India
Publisher OUP India
Weight(grams) 464g
Dimensions(mm) 221mm * 146mm * 24mm
