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

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Wiley, Feb 19, 2010 - Literary Criticism - 176 pages
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.
  • Traces and analyzes historical debates in historiography, anthropology and criminology
  • Argues that crime in the colonial context is used as much to control subject populations as to define morally repugnant behavior
  • Explores how crime evolved as the foil of political legitimacy under military
  • Examines the popular movement that has arisen to reverse the discrimination against the millions of people laboring under the stigma of criminal inheritance, producing a radical culture that contests stereotypes to reclaim their humanity

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About the author (2010)

Henry Schwarz 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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