In this ground-breaking study, Lyn Ossome offers an authoritative, interdisciplinary theory of how postcolonial capitalist democracies reproduce the gendered forms of violence essential to colonial rule.Focussing on postcolonial African states, and using an interdisciplinary methodology that combines insights from political studies, feminist political economy, historical studies, and literary studies, Ossome shows how postcolonial, capitalist democracies in Africa, like their colonial antecedents, use various identity-markers to determine whose rights and bodies are violable, to what extent, and whether and how the violated have a right to resist. Ossome buttresses her critique through evidence gathered from colonial archives in Kenya, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, as well as through critical comparisons of three artistic responses to gender-based violence and rape in South Africa and India, all of which shows how her insights might apply across the postcolonial Global South.
Lyn Ossome is Director of the Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR), Makerere University, Uganda, where she is also Associate Professor.
Introduction1. Colonial Modernity and the Gendered Subject of Violence2. Customary Law and the Gendered Constitution of Violent Subjectivities3. “Captive Maternals” and the Modern Subject of Gendered Violence4. Gender, Ethnicity and the Liberal Democratic State5. “The Art of the Unspeakable”: An Anatomy of Gendered Violence in Postcolonial South Africa and India6. Democracy’s Subjections
