Review of The Visceral Logics of Decolonization by Neetu Khanna.

Abstract

What if decolonized populations’ basic emotions, such as rage, jealousy,or ecstasy, are effusive of bourgeois tastes? Colonialism—Neetu argues—has impactedthese populations’capacity for sensing and experiencing life as generic human beings. And what if these far-from healthy affective modalities, set in motion during the anticolonial nationalist struggle, shape the postcolonial stalemate, not only in India but across over the decolonized world, post 1945? Questions such as these inspire Khanna Neetu’s new book, which if pursued, will encourage scholars to tease the attributive ‘postcolonial’as it has metastasized from the colonial situation, framing a propagation, never a rupture as the prefix suggests.

Keywords

• the visceral logics of decolonization
• neetu khanna
• anticolonial nationalist