Composing Violence

The Limits of Exposure and the Making of Minorities

By: Moyukh Chatterjee

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Paperback | 22 February 2023

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Paperback
277 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
23 x 15.5 x 0.5

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In 2002, armed Hindu mobs attacked Muslims in broad daylight in the west Indian state of Gujarat. The pogrom, which was widely seen over television, left more than one thousand dead. In Composing Violence Moyukh Chatterjee examines how highly visible political violence against minorities acts as a catalyst for radical changes in law, public culture, and power. He shows that, far from being quashed through its exposure by activists, media, and politicians, state-sanctioned anti-Muslim violence set the stage for transforming India into a Hindu supremacist state. The state's and civil society's responses to the violence, Chatterjee contends, reveal the constitutive features of modern democracy in which riots and pogroms are techniques to produce a form of society based on a killable minority and a triumphant majority. Focusing on courtroom procedures, police archives, legal activism, and mainstream media coverage, Chatterjee theorizes violence as a form of governance that creates minority populations. By tracing the composition of anti-Muslim violence and the legal structures that transform that violence into the making of minorities and majorities, Chatterjee demonstrates that violence is intrinsic to liberal democracy.

Industry Reviews

"It is through scholarship of the kind offered by Composing Violence that we can grapple with questions of mass violence, impunity and justice after violence in South Asia, and beyond, in any meaningful way." - Chulani Kodikara (Social and Legal Studies) "Composing Violence provides us with a necessary punch in the stomach. Its urgency lies in the way in which it forces us to look at, and begin to think anew with, what we know well but persist in overlooking: that violence against (religious) minorities is not exceptional or deviant, but mainstream." - Vera Lazzaretti (Religion and Society) "Chatterjee is at his best when he observes, records, and analyses in his own voice; Composing Violence is a testimonial to the importance of the activist-academic in combating the ideological and institutional forms of right-wing majoritarianism in India and elsewhere." - Suvir Kaul (American Ethnologist) "Composing Violence is an important read in the face of, and as a form of equipment against, globally rising right-wing politics and the everyday threat of Hindu nationalism." - Anushka Chaudhuri (Contemporary South Asia)

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