Description
Book SynopsisIlluminates the history of western anti-imperialism through the stories of a number of specific friendships that flourished between South Asians and Europeans between 1878 and 1914.
Trade Review“
Affective Communities is outstanding. It stretches postcolonial theory well beyond its usual boundaries. Leela Gandhi successfully documents the anti-imperial affiliations and politics of certain marginalized subcultures in late-nineteenth-century Britain and Europe, and she shows what Indian nationalists owed to these traditions.”—Dipesh Chakrabarty, author of
Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference“A very original and thought-provoking book,
Affective Communities offers an outstanding contribution to postcolonial and queer studies. Leela Gandhi provides detailed, brilliant discussions of particular figures such as Edward Carpenter, Henry Salt, and M. K. Gandhi and the ways in which they interwove their various radical counter-cultural interests into larger political strategies of anticapitalist utopianism.”—Robert J. C. Young, author of
Postcolonialism“
Affective Communities is an important book that challenges the founding principles of postcolonial theory not in order to reject its ambitions but to open new ways to approach these urgent issues. . . . This book is hard to put down, but it also invites frequent rereading as a guide and as a reformulation of the theoretically and politically complex terrain of anti-colonial and postcolonial theorising.” -- Linnell Secomb * Postcolonial Studies *
“I admire the passion, integrity, and brilliance with which [Gandhi] makes her case. . . . This is a book to be savoured for its suggestive insights. . . . Its intellectual energy derives . . . from Gandhi’s inventive retrieval and analysis of forgotten texts . . . . ” -- Seth Koven * International History Review *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements ix
1. Introduction: Affective Communities 1
2. Manifesto: Anticolonial Thought and the Politics of Friendship 13
3. Sex: The Story of Late Victorian Homosexual Exceptionalism 34
4. Meat: A Short Cultural History of Animal Welfare at the Fin-de-Siècle 67
5. God: Mysticism and Radicalism at the End of the Nineteenth Century 115
6. Art: Aestheticism and the Politics of Postcolonial Difference 142
7. Conclusion: An Immature Politics 177
Notes 191
Index 237
