Constructing the Criminal Tribe in Colonial India: Acting Like a Thief

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John Wiley & Sons, Feb 19, 2010 - Literary Criticism - 176 pages
Constructing the Criminal Tribe in Colonial India

Constructing the Criminal Tribe in Colonial India provides a detailed overview of the phenomenon of the criminal tribe in India from the early days of colonial rule to the present. Tracing and analyzing historical debates in historiography, anthropology, and criminology, Henry Schwarz argues that crime in the colonial context is used as much to control subject populations as to define morally repugnant behavior. Crime thus becomes the foil of political legitimacy under military conquest.

By the end of British rule in India, almost two hundred tribes had been criminalized, comprising four million people. Today some sixty million people still labor under the stigma of this criminal inheritance. In this new study, Schwarz explores the popular movement that has arisen to reverse this discrimination, producing a radical culture that contests stereotypes to reclaim humanity.

 

Contents

Acting Like a Thief Introduction
1
Acting Like a Thief 1 Placing Criminals Displacing Thuggee Historical Representation Fact and Stereotype c 18302005
13
Acting Like a Thief 2 How to Make a Thug Recipes for Producing Crime 18301910
47
Acting Like a Thief 3 Discipline Labor Salvation Repression Reform and the Thuggee Precedent
81
Acting Like a Thief 4 Acting Like a Thief From Aesthetics of Survival to the Politics of Liberation
112

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About the author (2010)

Henry Schwarz
The author is Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University. He is author of Writing Cultural History in Colonial and Postcolonial India (1997) and co-editor of Reading the Shape of the World: Toward an International Cultural Studies (with Richard Dienst, 1996) and of A Companion to Postcolonial Studies (with Sangeeta Ray, Blackwell, 2000).

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