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""Discipline and the Other Body "offers a brilliant and multifaceted exploration of the ways in which colonial power worked with the human body. Covering a great variety of colonial contexts, the contributors bring to light the connections between what Michel Foucault called biopower and the lived experience of colonial violence."--Timothy Mitchell, author of "Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity"

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Discipline and the Other Body

Duke University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments.......................................................................................................................................................................viiANUPAMA RAO AND STEVEN PIERCE Discipline and the Other Body: Humanitarianism, Violence, and the Colonial Exception...................................................................1KERRY WARD Defining and Defiling the Criminal Body at the Cape of Good Hope: Punishing the Crime of Suicide under Dutch East India Company Rule, circa 1652-1795.....................36SHANNON LEE DAWDY The Burden of Louis Congo and the Evolution of Savagery in Colonial Louisiana......................................................................................61ISAAC LAND "Sinful Propensities": Piracy, Sodomy, and Empire in the Rhetoric of Naval Reform, 1770-1870..............................................................................90DOUGLAS M. PEERS The Raj's Other Great Game: Policing the Sexual Frontiers of the Indian Army in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century............................................115ANUPAMA RAO Problems of Violence, States of Terror: Torture in Colonial India........................................................................................................151STEVEN PIERCE Punishment and the Political Body: Flogging and Colonialism in Northern Nigeria........................................................................................186DOROTHY KO Footbinding and Anti-footbinding in China: The Subject of Pain in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries............................................................215LAURA BEAR An Economy of Suffering: Addressing the Violence of Discipline in Railway Workers' Petitions to the Agent of the East Indian Railway, 1930-47.............................243SUSAN O'BRIEN Spirit Discipline: Gender, Islam, and Hierarchies of Treatment in Postcolonial Northern Nigeria........................................................................273YVETTE CHRISTIANSE Selections from Castaway..........................................................................................................................................303Bibliography..........................................................................................................................................................................317Contributors..........................................................................................................................................................................347Index.................................................................................................................................................................................349

Chapter One

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Discipline and the Other Body Humanitarianism, Violence, and the Colonial Exception

During the Mau Mau rebellion of the mid-1950s, the white settler and official populations of Kenya were swept by increasingly lurid rumors about Africans' oaths of resistance to colonial rule. At the height of the hysteria, the oaths were supposed to involve murder, blood-drinking, cannibalism, and necrophiliac bestiality. Worse, experts in the prisons department claimed, oaths once taken caused Africans to revert to savagery. Sixty years of the civilizing mission could be swept away in a night, as formerly docile peasants returned to murderous barbarism. The Kenyan government conceived of oath taking as creating a psychological problem that could be cured through an elaborate set of disciplinary techniques: Mau Mau prisoners were sent to special detention camps and forced to work in a "normal" manner, thereby returning to civilization:

If any detainee refused to comply with a lawful order to weed, [the] plan was that two warders should be allocated to that detainee and, by holding his hands, physically make him pull weeds from the ground. From [one official's] experience he was convinced that once such token work had been performed by the detainee he would have considered that he had broken his Mau Mau oath which had, by superstitious dread, previously prevented him from cooperating ... and thus [the detainee would] start on the road to freedom.

Both the rumors and the rehabilitative strategies of the detention camps reveal a curious logic to the Kenyan government's approach to ruling its African subjects. Engaging in a set of highly specific corporeal acts-ritual murder, cannibalism, sex with dead goats-seemed sufficient to destroy utterly the government's ability to rule, which could, however, be restored by forcing prisoners to mimic the motions of disciplined agricultural work. Governmental order could be achieved in relatively minimal ways (though requiring the coercive force of concentration camps), but savagery always lurked under the surface. The illegibility of natives' intentions and their susceptibility to the unreasonable worlds of magic and superstition rendered them the target of consistent and violent disciplining; native unreason could only be addressed by the exercise of unreasonable violence. Colonial discipline was justified as exceptional, a necessary disregard for metropolitan norms of justice and civility. Very often this ethos blurred distinctions between situations of war that engendered sustained campaigns of annihilation and the routine, rationalized forms of discipline through which "natives" were returned to the folds of virtuous labor and accumulation. The exigencies of governing the colonized ultimately produced uncomfortable similarities between the so-called barbarism of native practices and the acts of terror and violence used to contain them.

Only twenty years after this particular instance of colonial counterinsurgency, "human rights" came increasingly into popular discourse. In the United States, for example, President Jimmy Carter's emphasis on human rights opposed the excesses of Henry Kissenger's international realpolitik and was dismissed as ridiculously nave by Carter's successor, Ronald Reagan. Even so, human-rights discourse has become central to a post-Cold War governmental order, and actors of all political stripes have embraced human rights as a justification for their actions-as with the United States' and its allies' claims for invading Afghanistan and Iraq as humanitarian endeavors. But human-rights discourse coexists uneasily with the exercise of imperial power.

At the time of this writing, the scandals of torture in the American-run prison of Abu Ghraib in Iraq and of prisoners' torture and shadowy legal status in Guantnamo Bay reflect a continuing tension between humanitarianism and the treatment of "other" subjects. This is illustrated by the curious nominalism inherent in the U.S. government's attempts to distinguish between torture, "abuse," and "stress and duress" and to label the tortured "terrorists." As with the moral justification of earlier imperial ventures through ideas of progress and improvement, human rights today have become that which we "cannot not want," though contemporary events underline that they seem most desirable when manifestly denied. Because human rights are so obviously a good, it is necessary to inquire into the fraught history of the...