South Asian Governmentalities: Michel Foucault and the Question of Postcolonial Orderings

by Stephen Legg (Editor), Deana Heath (Editor)

Overview

This volume analyses the ways in which the works of one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, Michel Foucault, have been received and re-worked by scholars of South Asia. South Asian Governmentalities surveys the past, present, and future lives of the mutually constitutive disciplinary fields of governmentality - a concept introduced by Foucault himself - and South Asian studies. It aims to chart the intersection of post-structuralism and postcolonialism that has seen the latter Foucault being used to ask new questions in and of South Asia, and the experiences of post-colonies used to tease and test the utility of European philosophy beyond Europe. But it also seeks to contribute to the rich body of work on South Asian governmentalities through a critical engagement with the lecture series delivered by Foucault at the Collège de France from 1971 until his death in 1984, which have now become available in English.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781108449854
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	10/18/2018
Series:	South Asia in the Social Sciences , #6
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	278
Product dimensions:	6.02(w) x 8.98(h) x 0.59(d)

About the Author

Stephen Legg is Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Nottingham. He is a specialist on interwar colonial India with a particular interest in the politics of urban space within imperial and international frames. He has analyzed these spaces and frames through drawing upon theoretical approaches from memory scholarship, postcolonialism, political theory and governmentality studies. His publications include Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi's Urban Governmentalities (2007), Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities, and Interwar India (2014) and the edited collection Spatiality, Sovereignty and Carl Schmitt: Geographies of the Nomos (2011).

Deana Heath is a senior lecturer in Indian history at the University of Liverpool. Her research focuses on colonialism, the body, and state power. She is the co-editor of Communalism and Globalization in South Asia and its Diaspora (2010), and author of Purifying Empire: Obscenity and the Politics of Moral Regulation in Britain, India and Australia (Cambridge, 2010). Her current research focuses on various forms of embodied violence in colonial India, including torture, sexual violence against men, and interpersonal violence.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements; 1. Introducing South Asian governmentalities Deana Heath and Stephen Legg; 2. Governmentality in the East Partha Chatterjee; 3. Pastoral care, the reconstitution of pastoral power and the creation of disobedient subjects under colonialism Indrani Chatterjee; 4. The abiding binary: the social and the political in modern India Prathama Banerjee; 5. Colonial and nationalist truth regimes: empire, Europe and the latter Foucault Stephen Legg; 6. Law as economy/economy as governmentality: convention, corporation, currency Ritu Birla; 7. Do elephants have souls? Animal subjectivities and colonial encounters Jonathan Saha; 8. Plastic history, caste and the government of things in modern India Sara Hodges; 9. Changing the subject: from feminist governmentality to technologies of the (feminist) self Srila Roy; 10. The tortured body: the irrevocable tension between sovereign and biopower in colonial Indian technologies of Rule Deana Heath; 11. The subject in question Gerry Kearns; Bibliography; Index.