Organizing Empire: Individualism, Collective Agency, and India

By Purnima Bose

Organizing Empire critically examines how concepts of individualism functioned to support and resist British imperialism in India. Through readings of British colonial and Indian nationalist narratives that emerged in parliamentary debates, popular colonial histories, newsletters, memoirs, biographies, and novels, Purnima Bose investigates the ramifications of reducing collective activism to individual intentions. Paying particular attention to the construction of gender, she shows that ideas of individualism rhetorically and theoretically bind colonials, feminists, nationalists, and neocolonials to one another. She demonstrates how reliance on ideas of the individual-as scapegoat or hero-enabled colonial and neocolonial powers to deny the violence that they perpetrated. At the same time, she shows how analyses of the role of the individual provide a window into the dynamics and limitations of state formations and feminist and nationalist resistance movements.

From a historically grounded, feminist perspective, Bose offers four case studies, each of which illuminates a distinct individualizing rhetorical strategy. She looks at the parliamentary debates on the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, in which several hundred unarmed Indian protesters were killed; Margaret Cousins's firsthand account of feminist organizing in Ireland and India; Kalpana Dutt's memoir of the Bengali terrorist movement of the 1930s, which was modeled in part on Irish anticolonial activity; and the popular histories generated by ex-colonial officials and their wives. Bringing to the fore the constraints that colonial domination placed upon agency and activism, Organizing Empire highlights the complexity of the multiple narratives that constitute British colonial history.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0822327686
• ISBN13: 9780822327684
• Release Date: September 2003
• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Length: 280 Pages
• Weight: 0.87 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.7" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Postcolonialism, yes, but with a materialist edge to it...

In her first book, "Organizing Empire: Individualism, Collective Agency, and India," Purnima Bose musters strong archival skills, rhetorical elegance and theoretical sophistication to reveal (powerfully) the ways that colonial and anti-colonial forms of political discourse and historiography created domesticated models of "rogue individualism" and "heroic individualism" to explain away, disavow and sublimate into accomplishment the epistemic, legalized, and routine domination of the British Empire in India and Ireland. Modes of "feminist nationalist" and "heroic nationalist" forms are also exposed in relentless critical detail to show the makings of elite-subaltern forms of agency, narration, and resistance. Everywhere, the mode of analysis here is informed, engaged, fully situated and complex in its vision of agency, discourse, hegemony, and the state; no easy or comforting model of "postcolonial hybridity" is offered by her here to assuage the analysis of culture and discourse, as subjected individualism, under the enlightenment regimes and discourses of British empire.

Prolific pages for diverse audiences

Bose's beautiful prose style is exceeded only by the sharpness and originality of her insights. A must have for anyone interested in post-colonial theory, historical analysis of the region, or just curious thinkers interested in a great read.