Colonial Terror

Caution! For multiple reasons the stock that we show on the website sometimes differs with the real stock we have in the shop.

Colonial Terror

108.99

Focusing on India between the early nineteenth century and the First World War, Colonial Terror explores the centrality of the torture of Indian bodies to the law-preserving violence of colonial rule and some of the ways in which extraordinary violence was embedded in the ordinary operation of colonial states. Although enacted largely by Indians on Indian bodies, particularly by subaltern members of the police, the book argues that torture was facilitated, systematized, and ultimately sanctioned by first the East India Company and then the Raj because it benefitted the colonial regime, since rendering the police a source of terror played a key role in the construction and maitenance of state sovereignty. Drawing upon the work of both Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault, Colonial Terror contends, furthermore, that it is only possible to understand the terrorizing nature of the colonial police in India by viewing colonial India as a ‘regime of exception’ in which two different forms of exceptionality were in operation – one wrought through the exclusion of particular groups or segments of the Indian population from the law and the other by petty sovereigns in their enactment of illegal violence in the operation of the law. It was in such fertile ground, in which colonial subjects were both included within the domain of colonial law while also being abandoned by it, that torture was able to flourish.

SKU: 37621 Category: Tag:
Subtitle: Torture and State Violence in Colonial India /; OUP, ISBN , € 108.00
Author: Heath, Deana
Year: 2021
ISBN: 9780192893932
Pages: 240
Language: English
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Publisher's city: Oxford
Publication date:
Shopping Cart
Scroll to Top