An authoritative, interdisciplinary, intersectional theory of how postcolonial capitalist democracies reproduce the gendered violence essential to colonial rule.

In this ground-breaking study, Lyn Ossome offers an authoritative, interdisciplinary theory of how postcolonial capitalist democracies reproduce the gendered forms of violence essential to colonial rule.

Through an interdisciplinary methodology traversing political studies, feminist political economy, historical and literary studies, Ossome shows how postcolonial, capitalist democracies in Africa, like their colonial antecedents, use various identity-markers to determine whose rights and bodies are violable, to what extent, and whether and how the violated have a right to resist. The book critically reflects on the dilemmas and contradictions produced by the colonial encounter and its subjugative orders for the postcolonial democratizing state, interrogating why the failures of democratic institutions target gendered, labouring bodies. Through evidence gathered from colonial archives in Kenya, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, as well as through critical comparisons of two artistic responses to gender-based violence and rape in South Africa and India, Ossome offers a trenchant critique that, beyond the contexts analysed, is relevant across the postcolonial Global South.

"A powerful and incisive account of democracy’s entanglement with violence in the postcolony, this book lays bare the limits of the liberal democratic project in the postcolonial context. A must-read for anyone rethinking postcolonialism’s fraught relationship to Enlightenment legacies, it shows how democracy is often deployed as an alibi for violence by modern states, especially gendered violence carried out in its name. Centering women as both subjects of violation and as laboring, gendered agents of anti- and postcolonial struggle, the book makes a vital intervention in postcolonial feminist scholarship. Drawing on experiences from colonial and postcolonial Africa, it challenges readers to rethink both the promises and the failures of the democratizing process. Urgent, original, and deeply thought-provoking, it will reshape debates across disciplines." - Nikita Dhawan, Dresden University of Technology

"Democracy’s Subjections: Colonial Modernity and the Gendered Subject of Violence is a profound analysis of historical processes and historiographies rendering visible the enforced immiseration of peoples, from the vantage point of gendered labor, women and men, through and against empire’s modernist bifurcated rule in the Third World – Africa, Asias and the Americas. Seesaw acts continue indirect rule while composing post/colonial impasses, fulcrums that differentiate inimical subjects, captive in relations and conditions of modern violence. Democracy’s subjections make for multivalence in violability via differences instituted in between state and capital, with violated and violating in the margins, parsing oppression and exploitation, toward bringing out a possible democratic. This is a tour de force, a timely intervention." - Naifei Ding, National Central University, Taiwan

"Lyn Ossome's Democracy's Subjections: Colonial Modernity and the Gendered Subject of Violence is brilliant. This text weaves history, theory, political struggles, desire and public and personal devastations that shapes the lives of Black/African women. Ossome focuses on South Africa yet offers an international lens for feminism to deeply comprehend the devastations of democracy. This book should be read globally, so that feminists can better comprehend, in the US and elsewhere, the contradictions and betrayals of democracy." - Joy James, Ebenezer Fitch Professor of the Humanities, Williams College, and author of Contextualizing Angela Davis