Slum Acts (After the Postcolonial) by Veena Das (review)

Abstract

T exercise, execution, and more often, defense of torture in liberal democracies by the judicial apparatus of the state has garnered much anthropological ink in contemporary writings. In engagement with this vein of thinking, Veena Das’s new book, Slum Acts, asks the reader to confront different questions. Firstly, displacing the site through which torture could be seen and “made thinkable in academic writing,” Slum Acts moves away from the bureaucratic chambers of courts, prisons, official documents, media narratives, to the more humble and marginal spaces of minor documents, vernacular writings of false convicts, and slum areas to ask in what ways margins become connected to the imaginations of global terrorism? Is it the question of adding different parts to a singular whole, a “statist logic” fueled by conspiracy theories in which Das also finds much contemporary academic writing complicit, or can an anthropological imagination delve into various scales that don’t add up to a singular whole? Das pursues these multiple tentacles spread across what she calls minor documents, the dispersed body of police in the neighborhoods of slums, and vernacular literature .Thus, the ethnographic endeavour uncovers a thick sociality of language that confronts the question of violence not as an event, which is outside the everyday life but an excessive knowledge that pervades everyday life. In a fieldwork fidelity of patient listening, Das’s ethnographic ink examines what it means to acknowledge, live, and endure this “inordinate knowledge.” Inordinate knowledge, as she rightly argues, isn’t a form of counter knowledge to “suggest contestation, resistance, or struggle,” or an ability to tell “counter stories,” a path in which Michel Foucault’s