The Visceral Logics of Decolonization

“In this fascinating study of complex psychosomatic responses in modernist Indian literature, Neetu Khanna shows how the attempt on the part of Marxist writers associated with the Progressive Writers' Association to ‘think with the visceral’ repeatedly brought them to questions of time. The Visceral Logics of Decolonization makes a striking and original contribution to the study of affect and anticolonial politics, deepening our understanding of ‘corporeal aesthetics.’” - Sianne Ngai, University of Chicago

“Neetu Khanna's turn to the visceral aesthetics of anticolonial struggles is timely in its call for a renewed attention to the affective logics of revolutionary writings. Such a calibration directly confronts critical disavowal of multiple visceral archives that are so central to the Marxist consciousness of colonial and postcolonial thinkers. Khanna's introduction of ‘colonial affect’ in this provocative book makes an important contribution to affect studies.” - Anjali Arondekar, author of For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India

“The Visceral Logics of Decolonization presents new readings of fiction by Indian writers Khvaja Ahmad Abbas, Mulk Raj Anand, Ismat Chughtai, Rashid Jahan, and Ahmed Ali.... Its invocation of feeling anew extends Fanon’s call in The Wretched of the Earth to ‘try to set afoot a new man’––a dream that South Asian writers would have celebrated and shared.”

"Visceral Logics challenges scholars of African and African-American literatures to carry out similar investigations. . . . Students of postcolonialism will find the book exceptionally rewarding." - Fouad Mami, Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies

“Visceral Logics is a rich contribution to the fields of affect, performance, postcolonial and feminist theory. It is, too, a beautiful book, pulsing with the revolutionary spirit it traces. . . . Khanna reminds of the radical stakes of everyday feeling, embodied performance, and in turn, of literary study, as a political praxis of close reading.” - Sadie Barker, Women & Performance

“[The Visceral Logics of Decolonization] possesses political and theoretical implications that deserve to reach a wide audience in postcolonial studies, affect studies, and literary studies more generally.” - Christopher Lee, Science & Society