About Book
Disaffected examines the effects of antisedition law on the
overlapping public spheres of India and Britain under empire.
After 1857, the British government began censoring the press in
India, culminating in 1870 with the passage of Section 124a, a
law that used the term “disaffection” to target the emotional
tenor of writing deemed threatening to imperial rule. As a
result, Tanya Agathocleous shows, Indian journalists adopted
modes of writing that appeared to mimic properly British styles
of prose even as they wrote against empire. Agathocleous
argues that Section 124a, which is still used to quell political
dissent in present-day India, both irrevocably shaped
conversations and critiques in the colonial public sphere and
continues to influence anticolonialism and postcolonial
relationships between the state and the public. Disaffected
draws out the coercive and emotional subtexts of law,
literature, and cultural relationships, demonstrating how the
criminalization of political alienation and dissent has shaped
literary form and the political imagination.
Disaffected won the North American Victorian Studies
Association Award for Best Book of 2021 and was shortlisted
for the 2021 Research Society for Victorian Periodicals Colby
Scholarly Book Prize.
About Author
Tanya Agathocleous is Professor of English at
Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY,
where she teaches and researches nineteenth and
early twentieth-century Anglophone literature and
culture in colonial, postcolonial and transnational
contexts. The US edition of Disaffected: Emotion,
Sedition, and Colonial Law in the Anglosphere was
published by Cornell University Press in 2021. Other
works include Urban Realism and the
Cosmopolitan Imagination (Cambridge, 2011),
Teaching Literature: A Companion (Palgrave,
2003); the Broadview edition of Joseph Conrad’s
The Secret Agent. She has also written for literary
reviews such as Public Books and the Los Angeles
Review of Books .