Disaffected: Emotion, Sedition, and Colonial Law in the Anglosphere

by Tanya Agathocleous

Overview

Disaffected examines the effects of antisedition law on the overlapping public spheres of India and Britain under empire. After 1857, the British government began censoring the press in India, culminating in 1870 with the passage of Section 124a, a law that used the term "disaffection" to target the emotional tenor of writing deemed threatening to imperial rule. As a result, Tanya Agathocleous shows, Indian journalists adopted modes of writing that appeared to mimic properly British styles of prose even as they wrote against empire.

Agathocleous argues that Section 124a, which is still used to quell political dissent in present-day India, both irrevocably shaped conversations and critiques in the colonial public sphere and continues to influence anticolonialism and postcolonial relationships between the state and the public. Disaffected draws out the coercive and emotional subtexts of law, literature, and cultural relationships, demonstrating how the criminalization of political alienation and dissent has shaped literary form and the political imagination.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501753886
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	04/15/2021
Series:	Corpus Juris: The Humanities in Politics and Law
Pages:	234
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.69(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Tanya Agathocleous is Associate Professor of English at Hunter College. She is author of Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Affectation: The Aesthete and the Babu on Trial
2. Parody: Colonial Mimicry, Colonial Parody, and theMultiplicity of Punch
3. Review: Worlding White Supremacy and Indian Nationalism
4. Syncretism: From East and West to the Darker Nations
Conclusion

What People are Saying About This

Sukanya Banerjee

Tanya Agathocleous's Disaffected is a splendid and important study of the promulgation and longstanding consequences of Section 124 A, the colonial-era law against disaffection in India. This timely, incisive book is a must-read!

Seth Koven

Disaffected is a brilliant, bold, and field-changing book. Agathocleous shows that the phantasmatic legal injunction for Indians to show affection for their British masters incited them to deploy a stunning array of sly literary forms and generic innovations to evade and critique the logics of a racialized "Anglosphere." By putting British and South Asian literary cultures and histories within a single, albeit complexly heterogeneous, conceptual frame, Agathocleous allows us to see each in exciting new ways.

Editorial Reviews

Through detailed case studies of the periodical press in both Britain and India, Agathocleous compellingly explains how the redefinition of sedition—in terms of loyalty and disaffection—shaped both imperial power in late colonial period and the contours of Indian nationalism. In her careful attention to the circulation of periodicals, in the difficult work she has done in the vast archive of colonial print, and in creating a genuinely comparative theoretical framing, Agathocleous has provided scholars with a truly valuable resource.

Review 19

Disaffected offers an intricate, dynamic account of the way legal culture works far beyond the remit of a legal statute with effects again, intended and unintended evident in our own legal cultures today. [It] is an exemplary work of legal cultural studies.

-- "Modern Philology"

Through detailed case studies of the periodical press in both Britain and India, Agathocleous compellingly explains how the redefinition of sedition--in terms of loyalty and disaffection--shaped both imperial power in late colonial period and the contours of Indian nationalism. In her careful attention to the circulation of periodicals, in the difficult work she has done in the vast archive of colonial print, and in creating a genuinely comparative theoretical framing, Agathocleous has provided scholars with a truly valuable resource.

-- "Review 19"

From the Publisher

Disaffected offers an intricate, dynamic account of the way legal culture works far beyond the remit of a legal statute with effects again, intended and unintended evident in our own legal cultures today. [It] is an exemplary work of legal cultural studies.

Modern Philology