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Vortragsreihe

A Time of Emergency in Colonial India, 1914-1921

Renisa Mawani, University of British Columbia

What was the time of emergency in colonial India? In this talk, I address this question through the Ingress into India Ordinance and the Foreigners Ordinance that were issued in September 1914, one month following the outbreak of World War I and at a time of growing anticolonial insurgency.  As a mode of surveillance and preventative detention, the Ingress was aimed at Indians returning by sea from abroad. However, it was expanded to include merchants, traders, and anyone else deemed to be a threat to the British colonial government.

In his classic book, The Jurisprudence of Emergency, Nasser Hussain asks what colonial emergency might reveal about modern legality. I build on Hussain’s work to ask what the Ingress can tell us about the changing temporalities of law. If modern legality represents a synthesis of past, present, and future, emergency shifted temporal proportionality. The Ingress, I suggest, was informed by the past, deemed necessary in the present, but focused mainly on the future. The Ingress and the Foreigners Ordinance were not responses to legal transgression. Rather, they were informed by suspicions of an expanding anticolonialism that only intensified through fears of unregulated mobility in a time of colonial emergency.

Renisa Mawani is Canada Research Chair in Colonial Legal Histories and Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia, located on the ancestral and unceded territories of the Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm) peoples. From 2022-2025 she is a Global Professorial Fellow at the School of Law, Queen Mary University of London. 

Renisa is the author of Colonial Proximities (University of British Columbia Press, 2009) and Across Oceans of Law (Duke University Press, 2018), which was a finalist for the U.K. Socio-Legal Studies Association Theory and History Book Prize (2020) and winner of the Association of Asian American Studies Book Prize for Outstanding Contribution to History (2020). With Antoinette Burton, she is co-editor of Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary for Our Times (Duke University Press, 2020). With Antoinette Burton and Samantha Frost, she is co-editor of Biocultural Empire: New Histories of Imperial Life Worlds (2024) and with Kristie Flannery and Mikki Stelder, she is co-editor of Oceans as Archives (forthcoming in Routledge’s Ocean and Island Studies book series, 2025).

Renisa is currently working on a short book, The Laws of the Sea, which will be the inaugural volume in a new Cambridge Elements Series titled “Law and Humanities” and a longer monograph, Enemies of Empire, which will be a sequel to Across Oceans of Law.

Renisa Mawani wird über Zoom an der Veranstaltung teilnehmen. Für die Teilnahme am ZMO ist keine Registrierung erforderlich, um über Zoom teilzunehmen, bitte über den Link anmelden.

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Diese Veranstaltung gehört zur Vortragsreihe
ZMO-Kolloquium im Wintersemester 2024/2025
Law and Time

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