Composing Violence: The Limits of Exposure and the Making of Minorities

by Moyukh Chatterjee

Overview

In 2002, armed Hindu mobs attacked Muslims in broad daylight in the west Indian state of Gujarat. The pogrom, which was widely seen over television, left more than one thousand dead. In Composing Violence Moyukh Chatterjee examines how highly visible political violence against minorities acts as a catalyst for radical changes in law, public culture, and power. He shows that, far from being quashed through its exposure by activists, media, and politicians, state-sanctioned anti-Muslim violence set the stage for transforming India into a Hindu supremacist state. The state's and civil society’s responses to the violence, Chatterjee contends, reveal the constitutive features of modern democracy in which riots and pogroms are techniques to produce a form of society based on a killable minority and a triumphant majority. Focusing on courtroom procedures, police archives, legal activism, and mainstream media coverage, Chatterjee theorizes violence as a form of governance that creates minority populations. By tracing the composition of anti-Muslim violence and the legal structures that transform that violence into the making of minorities and majorities, Chatterjee demonstrates that violence is intrinsic to liberal democracy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478024293
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	01/20/2023
Series:	Theory in Forms
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	184
File size:	14 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Moyukh Chatterjee is a Visiting Scholar at the University of Edinburgh.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction. The Limits of Exposure  1
1. A Minor Reading  34
2. Composing the Archive  56
3. Against the Witness  76
4. Anti-Impunity Activism  93
5. Beyond the Unspeakable  107
Conclusion. Minor, Minorities, Minorization  127
Notes  139
Bibliography  151
Index  163

What People are Saying About This

Elementary Aspects of the Political: Histories from the Global South - Prathama Banerjee

“Moyukh Chatterjee offers an ethnography of the infrastructure of political violence—which is also the infrastructure of democracy—across the diverse registers of policing, activism, and the media. By mobilizing political philosophy, literary theory, legal theory, anthropology, and the sociology of knowledge, Chatterjee makes insights that are equally relevant to South Asia, the United States, and to democracies across the world.”

A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo - Nancy Rose Hunt

“In this powerful book, Moyukh Chatterjee gives us a brief, elegant, and novel way of thinking about violence.”

Editorial Reviews

"Chatterjee is at his best when he observes, records, and analyses in his own voice; Composing Violence is a testimonial to the importance of the activist-academic in combating the ideological and institutional forms of right-wing majoritarianism in India and elsewhere."

Suvir Kauln Ethnologist

"It is through scholarship of the kind offered by Composing Violence that we can grapple with questions of mass violence, impunity and justice after violence in South Asia, and beyond, in any meaningful way."

Social and Legal Studies - Chulani Kodikara

"Composing Violence provides us with a necessary punch in the stomach. Its urgency lies in the way in which it forces us to look at, and begin to think anew with, what we know well but persist in overlooking: that violence against (religious) minorities is not exceptional or deviant, but mainstream."

Religion and Society - Vera Lazzaretti

"It is through scholarship of the kind offered by Composing Violence that we can grapple with questions of mass violence, impunity and justice after violence in South Asia, and beyond, in any meaningful way."

--Chulani Kodikara "Social and Legal Studies" (12/6/2023 12:00:00 AM)

From the Publisher