States of Emergency
States of Emergency: Colonialism, Literature and Law
Stephen Morton
Series: Postcolonialism Across the Disciplines
Volume: 11
Copyright Date: 2013
Edition: 1
Published by: Liverpool University Press
Pages: 249
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vjmsx
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Book Info
States of Emergency
Book Description:

How can literature and culture from the postcolonial world help us to understand the relationship between law and violence associated with a state of emergency? And what light can legal narratives of emergency shed on postcolonial writing? States of Emergency: Colonialism, Literature and Law examines how violent anti-colonial struggles and the legal, military and political techniques employed by colonial governments to contain them have been imagined in literature and law. Through a series of case studies, the book considers how colonial states of exception have been defined and represented in the contexts of Ireland, India, South Africa, Algeria, Kenya, and Israel-Palestine, and concludes with an assessment of the continuities between these colonial states of emergency and the ‘wars on terror’ in Iraq, Afghanistan and Northern Pakistan. By doing so, the book considers how techniques of sovereignty, law and violence are reconfigured in the colonial present.

eISBN: 978-1-78138-075-8
Subjects: Language & Literature
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  1. Front Matter
    Front Matter (pp. i-iv)
  2. Table of Contents
    Table of Contents (pp. v-v)
  3. A Note on Translations
    A Note on Translations (pp. vi-vi)
  4. Acknowledgements
    Acknowledgements (pp. vii-viii)
  5. Introduction
    Introduction (pp. 1-32)

    Countries are considered to be in a ‘state of emergency’ when executive power is used to suspend the normal rule of law, and power is transferred to the police or military. Emergency legislation is often associated with totalitarian governments or so-called terrorist states, but liberal democracies have also made use of emergency law in times of social and political crisis. A consideration of the etymology of states of emergency can help to clarify the difference between lawful violence, or the violence that is regarded as the exclusive right of governments and states, and lawless violence, or the violence that is...

  6. Part I
    • CHAPTER 1 Sovereignty, Sacrifice and States of Emergency in Colonial Ireland
      CHAPTER 1 Sovereignty, Sacrifice and States of Emergency in Colonial Ireland (pp. 35-60)

      In an article published in March 1870, Jenny Marx-Longuet, daughter of the author ofThe Communist Manifesto, declared that ‘Theoretical fiction has it that constitutional liberty is the rule and its suspension an exception, but the whole history of English rule in Ireland shows that a state of emergency is the rule and that the application of the constitution is the exception.’¹ Writing in response to the Gladstone government’s ‘Peace Preservation (Ireland) Act’ of 1870, Marx-Longuet highlights a contradiction in the colonial policy of British sovereignty towards a country that was legally part of the United Kingdom between 1800 and...

    • CHAPTER 2 Terrorism, Literature and Sedition in Colonial India
      CHAPTER 2 Terrorism, Literature and Sedition in Colonial India (pp. 61-86)

      In a cartoon published in theHindi Punchmagazine entitled ‘Down with the Monster’ and dated May 1908, the Indian Viceroy Lord Minto is depicted as Hercules killing the twin-headed hydra of Indian anarchism and revolution with a club, on the side of which the words ‘LAW & ORDER’ are inscribed in capital letters. Facing this figure, on the opposite side of the cartoon, in the smoke clouds bellowing from the dying hydra’s two mouths, the following words are also written in capital letters: ‘TERRORISM, SEDITION, LAWLESSNESS, and MOZUFFERPURE [sic] OUTRAGE’. At first glance, what this cartoon exemplifies is the moral...

  7. Part II
    • CHAPTER 3 States of Emergency, the Apartheid Legal Order and the Tradition of the Oppressed in South African Fiction
      CHAPTER 3 States of Emergency, the Apartheid Legal Order and the Tradition of the Oppressed in South African Fiction (pp. 89-118)

      In an article published in the South African Communist party newspaperNew Agein September 1960, the left-wing writer Alex La Guma declares, ‘What a calamity the Emergency has been – for Afrikaner Nationalism’.¹ While La Guma concedes that the people detained under the emergency suffered in various ways – either through bankruptcy, redundancy, imprisonment without trial or a ‘sickening uncertainty’ about the duration of their detention – he repeats the claim that the ‘Emergency was a calamity for Afrikaner nationalism’.² In a rhetorical move that recalls Benjamin’s Eighth Thesis on the Concept of History, La Guma suggests that the...

    • CHAPTER 4 Torture, Indefinite Detention and the Colonial State of Emergency in Kenya
      CHAPTER 4 Torture, Indefinite Detention and the Colonial State of Emergency in Kenya (pp. 119-145)

      In June 2009 the London lawyers Leigh Day filed a legal case against the British government on behalf of five Kenyans representing the Mau Mau Veterans’ Association for atrocities and human rights violations committed during the state of emergency in Kenya between 1952 and 1960. In a letter addressed to the then British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, the former detainees begin by invoking the Kikuyu proverb ‘Muingatwo na kihoto dacokago; muingatwo na njuguma niacokaga’ (‘He who is defeated with unjust force will always come back, he who is dealt with justly will never come back’). By framing their demand for...

    • CHAPTER 5 Narratives of Torture and Trauma in Algeria’s Colonial State of Exception
      CHAPTER 5 Narratives of Torture and Trauma in Algeria’s Colonial State of Exception (pp. 146-170)

      In the opening sequence of Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1965 filmThe Battle of Algiers, a group of French paratroopers feed a half-naked Algerian man a cup of coffee. Shivering and visibly terrified, this prisoner’s non-verbal physical gestures clearly suggest that he has been tortured. These non-verbal signs of a body in pain are further confirmed by the appearance of the French military colonel in the cinematic frame, who inquires whether the man has talked, and by the threat that they will start all over again if the man refuses to comply with their demand that he help them locate one of...

  8. Part III
    • CHAPTER 6 The Palestinian Tradition of the Oppressed and the Colonial Genealogy of Israel’s State of Exception
      CHAPTER 6 The Palestinian Tradition of the Oppressed and the Colonial Genealogy of Israel’s State of Exception (pp. 173-208)

      It was in part the colonial state of emergency in British Mandatory Palestine that provided a legal and political framework for the formation of the state of Israel and its legislative order. For the Emergency Defence Regulations, as Said explains in a passing reference to the uses of British colonial law in Israel-Palestine, ‘were originally devised and implemented in Palestine by the British to be used against the Jews and Arabs’ during the mandate period, and especially during the Arab revolt of 1936–39. But after 1948, Israel retained the emergency regulations ‘for use in controlling the Arab minority’, and...

  9. Conclusion
    Conclusion (pp. 209-224)

    This book has assessed the ways in which states of emergency operated as a technique of governmentality in former European colonial states and the postcolonial legacies of such laws and techniques. As a law that suspends the normal rule of law, colonial states of emergency cannot be understood with reference to the rule of law alone, but also demand an engagement with the technologies of power, discourse and representation that stabilise particular formations of colonial sovereignty. As we have seen, colonial stereotypes and narratives have played a significant role in framing anti-colonial insurgents as the cause of colonial states of...

  10. Bibliography
    Bibliography (pp. 225-239)
  11. Index
    Index (pp. 240-249)
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