[Linganth] Moyukh Chatterjee discusses her book, Composing Violence

[Ilana Gershon]

Dear Colleagues,
Today on the blog, Drew Kerr asks Moyukh Chatterjee to discuss her new book,
Composing Violence.

campanthropology.org

Best,
Ilana

Press blurb: 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.
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