Violent Modernities: Cultural Lives of Law in the New India

Contents: Preface. Part I: EL the Theoretical EL. 1. Spectacles of Emancipation: Reading Rights Differently. Beyond Compassion: Children of Sex Workers and the Politics of Suffering (with Debolina Dutta). 3. Bollywood's Law: Cinema, Justice and Collective Memory. 4. New Queer Politics: Notes on Failure and Stuckness at a Negative Moment. Part II: EL is Personal EL. 5. The Silence of Gulberg: Refracted Memories, Inadequate Images. 6. Professor of Pathos: Upendra Baxi's Minor Jurisprudence. 7. The Conduct of Critique: Jurisdictional Account of a Feminist Journey. Consolidated Bibliography. Index.

Law and violence are thought to share an antithetical relationship in postcolonial modernity. Violence is considered the other of law, lawlessness is understood to produce violence, and law is invoked and deployed to undo the violence of lawlessness. Violent Modernities uses a critical legal perspective to show that law and violence in the New India share a deep intimacy, where one symbiotically feeds the other. Researched and written between 2008 and 2018, the chapters study the cultural sites of literature, cinema, people's movements, popular media and the university to illustrate how law’s promises of emancipation and performances of violence live a life of entangled contradictions. The book foregrounds reparative and ethical accounts where law does not only inhabit courtrooms, legislations and judgments, but also lives in the quotidian and minor practices of disobediences, uncertainties, vulnerabilities, double binds and failures. When the cultural lives of law are reimagined as such, the book argues, the violence at the foundations of modern law in the post colony begins to unravel.