Democracy’s Subjections

Colonial Modernity and the Gendered Subject of Violence

Lyn Ossome

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2026
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350545243
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this ground-breaking study, Lyn Ossome offers an authoritative, interdisciplinary theory of how postcolonial capitalist democracies reproduce the gendered forms of violence essential to colonial rule.

Through an interdisciplinary methodology traversing political studies, feminist political economy, historical and literary studies, Ossome shows how postcolonial, capitalist democracies in Africa, like their colonial antecedents, use various identity-markers to determine whose rights and bodies are violable, to what extent, and whether and how the violated have a right to resist. The book critically reflects on the dilemmas and contradictions produced by the colonial encounter and its subjugative orders for the postcolonial democratizing state, interrogating why the failures of democratic institutions target gendered, labouring bodies. Through evidence gathered from colonial archives in Kenya, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, as well as through critical comparisons of two artistic responses to gender-based violence and rape in South Africa and India, Ossome offers a trenchant critique that, beyond the contexts analysed, is relevant across the postcolonial Global South.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Gender in Colonial History
• 2 Colonial Modernity and the Gendered Subject of Violence
• 3 Customary Law and the Gendered Constitution of Violable Subjects
• 4 ‘Captive Maternals’ and the Modern Subject of Gendered Violence
• 5 Democracy’s Identitarian Problem: A Consideration of South Africa
• 6 ‘The Art of the Unspeakable’: An Anatomy of Gendered Violence in Postcolonial South Africa and India
• Epilogue: Democracy’s Subjections
• Endnotes
• References
• Index
• eCopyright