Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (review)
- Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship
A series of famous friendships between Indians and Europeans thread through Leela Gandhi's remarkable, imaginative exploration of anticolonial thought in the fin-de-siècle. Gandhi uses each of these relationships to probe the late Victorian intellectual subcultures that undergirded them. For Edward Carpenter, anti-imperialism meshed with a radical understanding of homosexuality; for Mirra Alfassa, the Parisian "Mother" of Sri Aurobindo's ashram, resistance to empire stemmed from ideas of spiritual union. Vegetarians, as the book's most novel chapter describes, fought imperial domination as an ethical counterpart to supporting animal rights.
In a single stroke, Gandhi succeeds both in breaking down cultural binaries and in drawing metropole and colony into the same frame. Portions, such as an eloquent evocation of Mohandas Gandhi's student days in London, are so beautifully written that one wishes such narrative more often superseded theoretical jargon. Yet through detailed argument, Gandhi compellingly rescues friendship—with its cousin utopianism—from the "charge of 'immaturity'" and presents it as a meaningful trope for cross-cultural understanding. How wonderful it would be if this "politics of friendship" could transcend the oppositions of the current imperial world.
Maya Jasanoff is associate professor of history at Harvard University. She has received the Duff Cooper Prize for her book Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850.
