"Discipline and the Other Body" reveals the intimate relationship
between violence and difference underlying modern governmental
power and the human rights discourses that critique it. The
comparative essays brought together in this collection show how, in
using physical violence to discipline and control colonial
subjects, governments repeatedly found themselves enmeshed in a
fundamental paradox: Colonialism was about the management of
difference--the "civilized" ruling the "uncivilized"--but colonial
violence seemed to many the antithesis of civility, threatening to
undermine the very distinction that validated its use. Violation of
the bodies of colonial subjects regularly generated scandals, and
eventually led to humanitarian initiatives, ultimately changing
conceptions of "the human" and helping to constitute modern forms
of human rights discourse. Colonial violence and discipline also
played a crucial role in hardening modern categories of
difference--race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and religion.
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
General
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