States of Emergency: Colonialism, Literature and Law by Stephen Morton (review)

To reach his concluding enjoiner—the contemporary imperative to “imagine a form of justice beyond the liberal fictions of human rights, democracy, and the normal rule of law” (224)—Stephen Morton traverses the historic colonial (and anticolonial) literary and legal narratives of five nation-states, Ireland, India, South Africa, Kenya, Algeria, and one nation-state still in the making, Palestine. States of Emergency: Colonialism, Literature and Law, published in the “Postcolonialism across the Disciplines” series from Liverpool University Press, trespasses as well across multiple disciplinary boundaries, including those that might seem to have been academically separated from one another: literature and law (as admitted in the title), but also history, anthropology, philosophy, and political science. Historically grounded and critically informed, States of Emergency offers a transgressive entrée for readers of “world literature” into the political ramifications and professional accountabilities of their globalized literary trekking. Morton, in other words, explores across these six geopolitical contexts and contestations—Ireland, India, South Africa, Kenya, Algeria, Palestine—the “contribution that literary and cultural texts have made to our understanding of the legal and political significance of states of emergency from the late nineteenth century to the present” (7). More specifically, with respect to that very significance, Morton argues, and in reference especially to Walter Benjamin’s “tradition of the oppressed,” that “from the standpoint of the oppressed, the state of emergency is a permanent historical condition, rather than an aberration in a liberal narrative of historical progress” (14).

The three main, but untitled, parts, in addition to the introduction and conclusion, that comprise States of Emergency are further divided into chapters. Untitled though they are, these parts proceed historically from colonialism (Ireland and Ireland) through post-independence (South Africa, Kenya, Algeria), to aspirational statehood (Palestine). Their chapters are both context-specific and narratively ordained, focusing as they do on specific narrative examples that make the case for the connections between and among “colonialism, law, and literature.” “Sovereignty, Sacrifice, and States of Emergency in Colonial Ireland,” the first chapter that introduces Part I, examines questions of sacrifice, necropolitics, and hunger strikes in an extended genealogy from the plaints of W. B. Yeats’s plays and poems through the dying pangs of Irish Republican political prisoner Bobby Sands, but focuses in particular on how “colonial stereotypes of violent nationalist insurgency in Ireland [might have] served to reinforce the use of emergency as a technique of governmentality” (99). Drawing on the speculations of political philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, and Slavoj Zizek in reading selected representatives of the popular genre of the “dynamite novel”—such as Tom Greer’s The Modern Daedalus (1885)—at the end of the nineteenth century, even as he inquires provocatively, and portentously, by way of conclusion, “what guarantees are that the public spectacle of self-starvation will challenge the authority of the colonial sovereign beyond the death of the political martyr?” (59).

In “Terrorism, Literature, and Sedition in Colonial India” (pt. 1, ch. 2), Morton goes on to pursue the seeming contradictions of unintended consequences in his reading not of “dynamite novels” but of “sedition novels” by asking after the genre’s very definition—are “sedition novels,” in other words, actually “seditious novels?” Is there, that is, a “connection between writing and ‘terrorism?’” (62). Morton explores the parameters of the debate over the “representation of the Indian revolutionary in literary and legal narratives of the early twentieth century” (62) through close contextual readings of popular, if no longer all canonical, novels of the time: Edmund Chandler’s Sri Ram Revolutionist (1912), Sarat Chandra Chatterjee’s Pather Dabi (1926), Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Dynamiters (1885), and The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad (1907). The conundrum that concluded the discussion of states of emergency in Ireland becomes instead whether emphases on spiritualism, nationalism, and revolutionary politics are themselves progenitors of what in the contemporary lexicon of the “war on terror” goes by the more opprobrious denomination of “radicalization.”

If part one of...