Discipline And the Other Body ― Correction, Corporeality, Colonialism

The contributors, who include both historians and anthropologists, address instances of colonial violence from the early modern period to the twentieth century and from Asia to Africa to North America. They consider diverse topics, from the interactions of race, law, and violence in colonial Louisiana to British attempts to regulate sex and marriage in the Indian army in the early nineteenth century. They examine the political dilemmas raised by the extensive use of torture in colonial India and the ways that British colonizers flogged Nigerians based on beliefs that different ethnic and religious affiliations corresponded to different degrees of social evolution and levels of susceptibility to physical pain. An essay on how contemporary Sufi healers deploy bodily violence to maintain sexual and religious hierarchies in postcolonial northern Nigeria makes it clear that the state is not the only enforcer of disciplinary regimes based on ideas of difference.

Contributors. Laura Bear, Yvette Christiansë, Shannon Lee Dawdy, Dorothy Ko, Isaac Land, Susan O’Brien, Douglas M. Peers, Steven Pierce, Anupama Rao, Kerry Ward

Steven Pierce is Lecturer in Colonial and Postcolonial History at the University of Manchester. He is the author ofFarmers and the State in Colonial Kano: Land Tenure and the Legal Imagination.

Anupama Rao is Assistant Professor of History at Barnard College. She is the editor ofGender and Caste: Contemporary Issues in Indian Feminism and a coeditor ofViolence, Vulnerability, and Embodiment.