Author: Purnima Bose
Publisher: Kali/Zubaan
Year: 2006
Language: English
Pages: 278
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8189884018
Description
Organizing Empire critically examines how concepts of individualism functioned to support and resist British imperialism in India. Through readings of British colonial and Indian nationalist narratives that emerged in parliamentary debates, popular colonial histories, newsletters, memoirs, biographies, and novels, Purnima Bose investigates the ramifications of reducing collective activism to individual intentions. Paying particular attention to the construction of gender, she shows that ideas of individualism rhetorically and theoretically bind colonials, feminists, nationalists, and neocolonials to one another. She demonstrates how reliance on ideas of the individual - as scapegoat or hero - enabled colonial and neocolonial powers to deny the violence that they perpetrated. At the same time, she shows how analyses of the role of the individual provide a window into the dynamics and limitations of state formations and feminist and nationalist resistance movements.
From a historically grounded, feminist perspective, Bose offers four case studies, each of which illuminates a distinct individualizing rhetorical strategy. She looks at the parliamentary debates on the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, in which several hundred unarmed Indian protestors were killed; Margaret Cousin's firsthand account of feminist organizing in Ireland and India; Kalpana Dutt's memoir of the Bengali terrorist movement of the 1930s, which was modeled in part on Irish anti-colonial activity; and the popular histories generate by ex-colonial officials and their wives. Bringing to the fore the constraints that colonial domination placed upon agency and activism, Organizing Empire highlights the complexity of the multiple narratives that constitute British colonial history.
REVIEWS
Organizing Empire is an excellent discussion of colonial subjectivities and, in particular, how concepts of individualism and collectivity from a binary that is used by both colonial power structures and anticolonial formations.
-Inderpal Grewal, author of Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire and the Cultures of Travel.
Organizing Empire makes an important contribution to postcolonial theory. Through her theorization of individualism, Purnima Bose opens up in compelling ways the counterpossibilities of collective agency and helps move the discussion of anticolonial resistance from a generalized subject to the analysis of specific conjunctures of resistant practice.
-David Lloyd, author of Ireland after History
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INTRODUCTION
1. Rogue-Colonial Individualism: General Dyer, Colonial Masculinity, Intentionality, and the Amritsar Massacre
2. Feminist-Nationalist Individualism: Margaret Cousins, Activism, and Witnessing
3. Heroic-Colonial Individualism: Raj Nostalgia and the Recuperation of Colonial History
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX