Violent Modernities: Cultural Lives of Law in the New India

Description

Law and violence are thought to share an antithetical relationship in postcolonial modernity. Violence is considered the other of law, lawlessness is understood to produce violence, and law is invoked and deployed to undo the violence of lawlessness. Violent Modernities uses a critical legal perspective to show that law and violence in the New India share a deep intimacy, where one symbiotically feeds the other. Researched and written between 2008 and 2018, the chapters study the cultural sites of literature, cinema, people's movements, popular media and the university to illustrate how law's promises of emancipation and performances of violence live a life of entangled contradictions. The book foregrounds reparative and ethical accounts where law does not only inhabit courtrooms, legislations and judgments, but also lives in the quotidian and minor practices of disobedience, uncertainties, vulnerabilities, double binds and failures. When the cultural lives of law are reimagined as such, the book argues, the violence at the foundations of modern law in the postcolony begins to unravel. "This is a book of dazzling erudition [that is] not channeled into the disinterested pursuit of critique as enlightenment, but a constant questioning of the theorist as activist, and the activist as theorist... Violent Modernities in chapter after chapter [is] an expression of love as a brawl with law for space―the space to invoke, listen to and perform law differently―in a quest marked by grace and daring." -- Vasuki Nesiah, Professor of Practice, New York University, USA (from the foreword) OS_VM_Final Cover OS_Violent Modernities_Final Proofs 01_Chapter 01_1-52 05_Chapter 05_187-209