Problematizing Law, Rights and Childhood in Israel/Palestine

Abstract

citizenship” (69), while also exposing the hypocrisy of liberal Britain as a global civilising force. Chapter three draws upon the same sorts of materials examined in chapter two, and on a subject that, as in the case of torture in Madras, has received considerable scholarly attention, the 1865 Morant Bay Uprising in Jamaica, during which military forces tortured and killed British Afro-Jamaican subjects over the course of a month-long period of martial law. It concentrates, however, not on those tortured during the uprising, but on the under-studied perpetrators of such torture, and the role of torture in undermining their claims to liberal citizenship. The problem for the perpetrators of such violence, Anderson notes, was that “torture could foreclose the possibilities of citizenship rather than opening them up” (73). Twisted Words continues its important focus on perpetrators in chapters four and five, which explore what happens when civilian, rather than military, citizen-subjects take up the mantle of the state by attempting to assert, or reassert, their sovereignty through the use of torture – in chapter four, in the family home, and in five, in two settler colonial contexts (in Oceania and southern Africa). These chapters demonstrate how, in addition, understandings of torture expanded to include psychological violence as a form of “domestic terrorism” (15). Returning, again, to fiction, in chapter four Anderson examines works by writers such as George Meredith, George Eliot and Anthony Trollope to elucidate the ways in which unchecked sovereign power by husbands over their wives – who, like colonial subjects, were positioned uncertainly between subjecthood and citizenship – was critiqued by such writers as a danger not only to the bodily well-being and liberal subjectivity of husbands, but to the modern state as well. In chapter five, in contrast, Anderson examines works of fiction by authors such as Louis Becke, Bertram Mitford and W. C. Scully, which demonstrate the brutal reality of life under liberalism in settler colonies through portraying British men who enacted vigilante terrorism against indigenous subjects as rogue citizens of empire who “appropriate the state-of-emergency rhetorics originally invoked by the British state to sanction torture in reaction to perceived social crises” (16). Like the torturing husband, such men ultimately, therefore, served to draw attention to the nature of state terrorism, and in the process to undermine it. Such a function is served, in turn, by Anderson’s excellent book, which will prove of value to scholars in a wide range of disciplines.