Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewDisaffected: Emotion, Sedition, and Colonial Law in the Anglosphere. Tanya Agathocleous. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021. Pp. xvii+211.Ayelet Ben-YishaiAyelet Ben-YishaiUniversity of Haifa Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreTanya Agathocleous’s new monograph begins with a small but important legal event, the 1870 inclusion of section 124a to the Indian legal code. This addition to the legal arsenal of the colonial government defined as a crime any attempt to excite feelings of disaffection (later amended to include “haters and contempt” and “disloyalty and all feelings of enmity”) toward the colonial government (6). Agathocleous convincingly seizes on section 124a not only as the legal-historical milestone it most definitely was, but as a nexus of several major discursive and political developments, with ongoing repercussions far beyond the law, beyond British colonialism, and beyond India. Most centrally, she recognizes in the section a shift from the more concrete accusations of “sedition” or “seditious libel” (6) to the amorphous realm of affect, defining the relationship between colonizer and colonized as one of feeling and sentiment (although only Indians were conceived of as susceptible to emotion, or at least dangerously so).The book’s four chapters each describe a main “critical tactic” (32) used by the Indian press to evade charges of disaffection and sedition: affectation, parody, review, and syncretism. Rather than describing the policing of dissent, Disaffected traces the effects of this policing of affect on the publishing culture and on the larger public sphere around the turn of the twentieth century. In Agathocleous’s words, the book is “less about the methodologies used to police dissent—the politicization of aesthetics—and more about the aesthetic effects of politicization. From babu English to the form of periodicals, from caricature to allegories of East and West, the policing of disaffection helped shape colonial politics, colonial literature, and their interrelation, by associating them with each other from the outset” (12). Indeed, the book shows the far-reaching effects of this turn to affect in resignifying colonial relations, in ways intended (to escape surveillance, for example, or to deny culpability) and unintended by the writers of these texts or by colonial legislators. The survival strategies taken on by the Indian press in the face of 124a allowed it to develop more nuanced forms of resistance, as well as expose the inherent contradictions in the so-called British rule of law and the liberal ideology that underwrote it. More complex were the unforeseen consequences of these strategies—namely, the creation of a complex network of what Homi Bhabha termed “mimicry” and “sly civility” (28) as well as other forms on which writers drew to evade censorship or sanction. These in turn demanded new forms of editing and publishing, with new attendant interpretative strategies. All of these would go on to destabilize and change not only Indian publishing but also Anglo-Indian and British discourse and politics.In this sense, Disaffected is an exemplary work of legal cultural studies. It explores the legal culture of the Anglosphere as a living, dynamic construct, containing disparate entities beyond what is narrowly conceived as the law. This legal culture is akin to what Patricia Ewick has called “legality.” “Every time a person interprets some event in terms of legal concepts or terminology—whether to applaud or criticize, whether to appropriate or resist—legality is produced. The production may include innovations as well as faithful replication. Either way, repeated invocation of the law sustains its capacity to comprise social relations.”1 Whether discussing the Bangavasi trial that first crystalized the link between sedition and disaffection (chap. 1), the various permutations of Punch or literary reviews (chaps. 2, 3), or the complex ways in which discourse of East-West “friendship” circulated (chap. 4), Disaffected offers an intricate, dynamic account of the way legal culture works far beyond the remit of a legal statute (in this case 124a) with effects—again, intended and unintended—evident in our own legal cultures today.The dizzying effect of form and content circulating in this discursive hall of mirrors is beautifully and wittily laid out in Disaffected. Agathocleous’s agile juxtaposition of diverse texts and contexts, and the surprising connections that she teases out between them, make this book not only edifying but also a pleasure to read. Her careful historicization and close readings of the texts—including images, cartoons, fiction, poetry, magazine mastheads and mottoes—make a clear and cogent argument. Indeed, one of the book’s main strengths lies in its intricate account of what Agathocleous calls the Anglosphere—the public sphere created by the circulation of English or English-language texts in or about colonial India, whether written, printed, or reprinted by Indians, British, or Anglo-Indians, in India, Britain, or elsewhere in the empire. Too often studied apart, these texts are closely imbricated in each other, and each of these texts carried the indelible marks of its contemporaries, as Disaffected makes vividly clear.For example, the final chapter strays farthest from section 124a to focus on the discourse of friendship. This chapter moves from the vertical affection that colonizers demanded from the colonized to the ostensibly horizontal “friendship” of an idealized East-West syncretism, in which the Anglosphere was a “neutral space in which British and Indian writers conversed as equals” (177). However, rather than just offering a critique of this ideal, Agathocleous shows how the writers, speakers, and texts themselves showed increasing awareness of its hypocrisy or falsity, even while deploying and redeploying the fantasy for various means and ends. The modernist, cosmopolitan Anglosphere is revealed as a complex and complicit place, where a constant chain of citation, allusion, and repetition allows speakers and writers to evade one form of complicity only to inadvertently be ensnared in others. The payoff of the Anglosphere as a field of inquiry is evident in this chapter as a productive reframing of modernist aesthetics and colonial politics. In the book as a whole, it opens new forms and methodologies for thinking about affect, legal culture, and historicizing the objects of colonial and postcolonial inquiry.Notes1. Patricia Ewick and Susan Silbey, The Commonplace of Law: Stories from Everyday Life (University of Chicago Press, 1998), 43, 45. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 120, Number 3February 2023 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/722289 Views: 132Total views on this site HistoryPublished online November 15, 2022 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.