Colonial Violence and Colonial Rule

Colonial Violence and Colonial Rule Inderpal Grewal (bio) what israel, europe, and the us are silencing the production and articulation of knowledge across the world and especially in universities identifying Israel as a violent settler-colonial state. This is an impossible task because researchers, writers, and artists have transformed the prevalent view in Euro-America that colonialism was a benign project, bringing progress to the Global South. Intensive research based on colonial archives (including by the Palestinian intellectual, Edward Said) reveals that colonialism was a brutal enterprise, using spectacular and disproportionate violence to subjugate and repress.1 Numerous uprisings historically testify to this brutality; the Indian soldiers' uprising in 1857,2 the point-blank massacre of over 400 peaceful protesters in Amritsar in 1919,3 the killing of over twenty thousand Mau Mau in Kenya4 and the atrocities committed by the French against the fln in Algeria5—among countless other instances. Narratives of sexual violence on white female bodies (never proven for 1857 India) sanctioned the brutal colonial responses.6 [End Page 534] As with European colonialism, Israel projects the barbarity of colonial rule onto anti-colonial uprisings, while claiming that its own inheritance is one of democracy and Western enlightenment, including that the colonial state enables women's and lgbtq rights, a claim disproven by Zionist ideology.7 What is so colonial about Israel is this infliction of excessive and spectacular suffering through the genocidal bombing of Gaza, the cruel expulsions of Palestinians, aided and abetted by racial logics of Euro-American colonialisms. Yet, as the histories of colonialism tell us, anti-colonial movements survive and flourish in the most unexpected ways across national boundaries.8 Today, in the global protests against the genocidal assault on Palestinians, we might be seeing the emergence of a transnational anti-colonial movement for peace, for plural democracies with rights and sovereignty for all, and against perpetual war and the security state. [End Page 535] Inderpal Grewal inderpal grewal is professor emeritus in the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Her most recent publications include "gbv and Postcolonial India: Transnational Media, Hindutva, and Muslim Racializations" (The Cunning of Gender Violence, Duke University Press, 2023), and "Security Regimes: Transnational and Imperial Entanglements," coauthored by Samar Al-Bulushi, Sahana Ghosh, in Annual Review of Anthropology (2023). Footnotes 1. Michelle Gordon, Extreme Violence and the 'British Way': Colonial Warfare in Perak, Sierra Leone and Sudan (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020). Taylor C. Sherman, State Violence and Punishment in India (London: Routledge, 2010). Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019). 2. Gautam Chakravarty, The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 3. Irfan Habib, "Jallianwala Bagh Massacre: The First Wave of Mass Struggle and Its Aftermath, 1919–26." Social Scientist 47, no.5/6 (2019): 3–8. Shereen Ilahi, Imperial Violence and the Path to Independence: India, Ireland and the Crisis of Empire (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016). V.N. Datta and Nonica Datta, Jallianwala Bagh: A Groundbreaking History of the 1919 Massacre. (Delhi: Penguin Random House India Private Limited, 2021). 4. Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2010). David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005). 5. Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier (1965; repr. New York: Grove Press, 2022). 6. Kim A. Wagner, The Great Fear of 1857: Rumours, Conspiracies and the Making of the Indian Uprising (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010). Kim A. Wagner, Rumours and Rebels: A New History of the Indian Uprising of 1857 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2017). Jenny Sharpe' Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 7. Jasbir Puar, "Rethinking Homonationalism." International Journal of Middle East Studies 45, no. 2 (2013): 336–39. Lynn Darwich, and Haneen Maikey, "The Road from Antipinkwashing Activism to the Decolonization of Palestine," Women's Studies Quarterly 42, no. 3/4 (2014): 281–85. 8. Erez Manela, and Heather Streets-Salter, eds. The Anticolonial Transnational: Imaginaries, Mobilities, and Networks in the Struggle against Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University

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