In this remarkable account of imperial citizenship, Sukanya
Banerjee investigates the ways that Indians formulated notions of
citizenship in the British Empire from the late nineteenth century
through the early twentieth. Tracing the affective, thematic, and
imaginative tropes that underwrote Indian claims to formal equality
prior to decolonization, she emphasizes the extralegal life of
citizenship: the modes of self-representation it generates even
before it is codified and the political claims it triggers because
it is deferred. Banerjee theorizes modes of citizenship decoupled
from the rights-conferring nation-state; in so doing, she provides
a new frame for understanding the colonial subject, who is usually
excluded from critical discussions of citizenship.
Interpreting autobiography, fiction, election speeches, economic
analyses, parliamentary documents, and government correspondence,
Banerjee foregrounds the narrative logic sustaining the
unprecedented claims to citizenship advanced by racialized colonial
subjects. She focuses on the writings of figures such as Dadabhai
Naoroji, known as the first Asian to be elected to the British
Parliament; Surendranath Banerjea, among the earliest Indians
admitted into the Indian Civil Service; Cornelia Sorabji, the first
woman to study law in Oxford and the first woman lawyer in India;
and Mohandas K. Gandhi, who lived in South Africa for nearly
twenty-one years prior to his involvement in Indian nationalist
politics. In her analysis of the unexpected registers through which
they carved out a language of formal equality, Banerjee draws
extensively from discussions in both late-colonial India and
Victorian Britain on political economy, indentured labor, female
professionalism, and bureaucratic modernity. Signaling the
centrality of these discussions to the formulations of citizenship,
"Becoming Imperial Citizens" discloses a vibrant transnational
space of political action and subjecthood, and it sheds new light
on the complex mutations of the category of citizenship.
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