Discipline and the Other Body: Correction, Corporeality, Colonialism (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Discipline and the Other Body: Correction, Corporeality, Colonialism ed. by Steven Pierce and Anupama Rao Clare Anderson Discipline and the Other Body: Correction, Corporeality, Colonialism. Edited by Steven Pierce and Anupama Rao. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. This fascinating set of essays tackles a central paradox of colonialism: the centrality of violence to the supposedly “civilizing mission” of European empires. The editors argue that bodily violence and its relationship to colonial reason were central to histories of the colonial body and repertoires of colonial governance. Moreover, bodily violence marked and constituted the boundaries of alterity (categories of race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality) which became enmeshed in the colonial state (pp. 3–4). Four of the nine essays were published as a special edition of the journal Interventions in 2001, and their further expansion and publication is a welcome addition to the growing historical and anthropological literature on the history of the body. Douglas M. Peers, Anupama Rao and Laura Bear examine the policing of sexuality in the early nineteenth-century Indian army, torture in colonial India, and twentieth-century Indian railway workers’ petitions. Steven Pierce and Susan O’Brien look at flogging in colonial and ‘spirit discipline’ in post-colonial Nigeria. Kerry Ward discusses the punishment of suicide at the Dutch East India Company’s Cape of Good Hope; Shannon Lee Dawdy punishment in eighteenth-century colonial Louisiana; Isaac Land corporal punishment in the British navy; and, Dorothy Ko attempts to abolish foot binding in twentieth-century China. In the final chapter, Yvette Christianse presents a collection of imaginative poetry that seeks to give voice to lost narrations of the experience of exile. The collection is a timely intervention on the politics of colonial violence in a post-9/11 world, and the editors state that contemporary concerns – notably the tension between the centrality of human rights discourses to recent US imperial interventions and their violation in places like Guantánamo Bay (Cuba) and Abu Ghraib (Iraq) – drive the essays. To some extent this is true, notably in the chapters on torture in India and flogging in Nigeria by Rao and Pierce. However, the collection as a whole marks a much broader and more significant intervention in the history and anthropology of the body than the introduction implies. It addresses with great clarity and depth not just violence against or the punishment of the body, but its regulation and modification, as also violence as metaphor and/or discourse. Furthermore, Christianse’s Castaway verses make an important methodological contribution to debates about retrieving subaltern voices from colonial archives. Though the editors are right in drawing out the continuities of colonial expansion (p. 20), for comparative work of this kind is of enormous value, I would like to have seen more on the ambivalences and differences of intimate body politics over time and space – and thus of the differential relationship between the body and the broader social and economic concerns of European empires. The invocation of the ‘scandalous violation’ of the body as ‘a pattern repeated from India to King Leopold’s Congo’ (p. 21), is in this respect somewhat striking, for the politics of the rubber plantation produced spectacularly different corporal results in places like the Congo and Burma. What do the politics of the body reveal about differences in the colonial state? For instance, within the British Empire is it significant that Indian women were exempt from flogging while African women were subject to it? And how might the bodily practices of European empires be compared in the African continent? Perhaps this question would have been addressed – and the broader significance of the essays in this respect drawn out - had the collection been more squarely situated within extant literature. Despite massively expanding historiographies (and anthropologies) of the politics of the colonial body, there are significant bibliographical omissions. This leads to a few extraordinary claims such as that flogging in British colonies has yet to receive scholarly attention (pp. 187, 210 n. 5). Notwithstanding the important work of Douglas M. Peers – himself a contributor to this book – what of the work of Radhika Singha, Florence Bernault, or Raymond Evans and William Thorpe? Finally, I am somewhat troubled by the...