Affective Communities

Leela Gandhi teaches at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. She is the author of Postcolonialism: A Critical Introduction, a coauthor of England in Twentieth-Century Fiction: Through Colonial Eyes, and a coeditor of the journal Postcolonial Studies.

• Acknowledgements ix1. Introduction: Affective Communities 12. Manifesto: Anticolonial Thought and the Politics of Friendship 133. Sex: The Story of Late Victorian Homosexual Exceptionalism 344. Meat: A Short Cultural History of Animal Welfare at the Fin-de-SiÈcle 675. God: Mysticism and Radicalism at the End of the Nineteenth Century 1156. Art: Aestheticism and the Politics of Postcolonial Difference 1427. Conclusion: An Immature Politics 177Notes 191Index 237

“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)