Organizing Empire: Individualism, Collective Agency, and India

by Purnima Bose

Book Overview

Organizing Empire critically examines how concepts of individualism functioned to support and resist British imperialism in India. Through readings of British colonial and Indian nationalist narratives that emerged in parliamentary debates, popular colonial histories, newsletters, memoirs, biographies, and novels, Purnima Bose investigates the ramifications of reducing collective activism to individual intentions. Paying particular attention...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0822327686
• ISBN13: 9780822327684
• Release Date: September 2003
• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Length: 280 Pages
• Weight: 0.87 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.7" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Postcolonialism, yes, but with a materialist edge to it...

In her first book, "Organizing Empire: Individualism, Collective Agency, and India," Purnima Bose musters strong archival skills, rhetorical elegance and theoretical sophistication to reveal (powerfully) the ways that colonial and anti-colonial forms of political discourse and historiography created domesticated models of "rogue individualism" and "heroic individualism" to explain away, disavow and sublimate into accomplishment the epistemic, legalized, and routine domination of the British Empire in India and Ireland. Modes of "feminist nationalist" and "heroic nationalist" forms are also exposed in relentless critical detail to show the makings of elite-subaltern forms of agency, narration, and resistance. Everywhere, the mode of analysis here is informed, engaged, fully situated and complex in its vision of agency, discourse, hegemony, and the state; no easy or comforting model of "postcolonial hybridity" is offered by her here to assuage the analysis of culture and discourse, as subjected individualism, under the enlightenment regimes and discourses of British empire.

Prolific pages for diverse audiences

Bose's beautiful prose style is exceeded only by the sharpness and originality of her insights. A must have for anyone interested in post-colonial theory, historical analysis of the region, or just curious thinkers interested in a great read.