Affective Communities
Anticolonial Thought, Fin-De-Siecle Radicalism and the Politics of Friendship

Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-De-Siecle Radicalism and the Politics of Friendship by Leela Gandhi (Paperback) (ISBN: 9780822337157)

Focusing on individuals and groups who renounced the privileges of imperialism to elect affinity with victims of their own expansionist cultures, this title uncovers the utopian-socialist critiques of empire that emerged in Europe, specifically in Britain, at the end of the nineteenth century.

Gandhi weaves together the stories of a number of South Asian and European friendships that flourished between 1878 and 1914, tracing the complex historical networks connecting figures like the English socialist and homosexual reformer Edward Carpenter and the young Indian barrister M. K. Gandhi, or the Jewish French mystic Mirra Alfassa and the Cambridge-educated Indian yogi and extremist Sri Aurobindo.In a global milieu where the battle lines of empire are re-emerging in newer and more pernicious configurations, "Affective Communities" challenges homogeneous portrayals of 'the West' and its role in relation to anti-colonial struggles. Drawing on Derrida's theory of friendship, Gandhi puts forth a powerful new model of the political: one that finds in friendship a crucial resource for anti-imperialism and trans-national collaboration.