J Barton Scott
Biographic Data
| ID | 3586992 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J Barton Scott |
| GIVEN NAMES | J Barton |
| FAMILY NAME | Scott |
| SIGNATURE | SCOTT J B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 11 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 11 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 11 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Hindutva and Violence: V. D. Savarkar and the Politics of History
Heterodoxies of the Body: Death, Secularism, and the Corpse of Raja Rammohun Roy
In 1833, Rammohun Roy, the so-called 'Father of Modern India,' died abruptly while traveling in England. Because cremation was then illegal in Britain, he was buried rather than immolated according to brahminical norms. This article situates the micro-history of his colonial corpse within the genealogy of secularism. I take secularism as a formation of the body in the most morbidly literal of ways-fused to embodied formations of race, caste, clas…
Insulting Religion: Penal Secularism and the Government of Feeling
This article revisits the Indian Penal Code’s restrictions on religious offense, especially Section 295A, with particular attention to nineteenth-century debates about secularizing the English common law of blasphemy. Building on scholarship that takes the histories of British and Indian secularisms as constitutively intertwined, I suggest that these entangled legal secularisms are best studied within a single analytic frame. I further suggest th…
Enoch from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, vol. 1: Sources from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. By John C. Reeves and Annette Yoshiko Reed
Enoch from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, vol. 1: Sources from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. By John C. Reeves and Annette Yoshiko Reed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. vii + 403. $150
Only Connect: Three Reflections on the Sociality of Secularism
The three reflections joined together in this essay develop a notion of “the sociality of secularism”—a phrase that gestures to how secularism structures the social field, becoming an intimate part of the practice of self for subjects who are always inextricably intertwined with others in a network of connectedness that is central to what it means to be worldly. The first reflection, by following the English word priestcraft to colonial India, de…
Translated Liberties: Karsandas Mulji's Travels in England and the Anthropology of the Victorian Self
Through an analysis and historical contextualization of Gujarati writer Karsandas Mulji's Travels in England (1866), this article makes two interrelated arguments. First, Indian liberals' efforts to translate notions of liberty exposed the gap between liberalism's subtractive and additive projects, its abolition of customary constraints on the subject and its imposition of new constraints. Second, Mulji's travelogue suggests the complexity of ant…
Spiritual Despots: Modern Hinduism and the Genealogies of Self-Rule
How to Defame a God: Public Selfhood in the Maharaj Libel Case
This article argues that competing ideas about the nature of public selfhood structured the Maharaj Libel Case, as well as colonial publics more broadly. Jadunathji Maharaj had, in effect, lost his libel suit even before it went to court. For libel law, the essence of the human person is a private self that owns various forms of property, including the public persona known as ‘reputation’. For the Hindu Pushtimarg, meanwhile, the Maharaj was cons…
What is a Public? Notes from South Asia
In South Asia, as elsewhere, the category of ‘the public’ has come under increased scholarly and popular scrutiny in recent years. To better understand this current conjuncture, we need a fuller understanding of the specifically South Asian history of the term. Toward this end, our discussion begins by considering more than two decades of scholarship that have worked to excavate this history. We propose that two principal methods or approaches—th…
Aryas Unbound
This article analyzes a controversial book ban from the 1940s to trace the mutual determinations of print media, the legal regulation of communal sentiment, and the discourse of religious tolerance in late colonial India. Claimed as the Bible of the Arya Samaj, the Satyarth Prakash (The Light of Truth) was banned in the Muslim-majority province of Sindh because of its defamatory remarks about the Prophet Muhammad. The result was a controversy of …
Miracle Publics: Theosophy, Christianity, and the Coulomb Affair
What is a Public? Notes from South Asia
In South Asia, as elsewhere, the category of ‘the public’ has come under increased scholarly and popular scrutiny in recent years. To better understand this current conjuncture, we need a fuller understanding of the specifically South Asian history of the term. Toward this end, our discussion begins by considering more than two decades of scholarship that have worked to excavate this history. We propose that two principal methods or approaches—th…
Only Connect: Three Reflections on the Sociality of Secularism
The three reflections joined together in this essay develop a notion of “the sociality of secularism”—a phrase that gestures to how secularism structures the social field, becoming an intimate part of the practice of self for subjects who are always inextricably intertwined with others in a network of connectedness that is central to what it means to be worldly. The first reflection, by following the English word priestcraft to colonial India, de…
Translated Liberties: Karsandas Mulji's Travels in England and the Anthropology of the Victorian Self
Through an analysis and historical contextualization of Gujarati writer Karsandas Mulji's Travels in England (1866), this article makes two interrelated arguments. First, Indian liberals' efforts to translate notions of liberty exposed the gap between liberalism's subtractive and additive projects, its abolition of customary constraints on the subject and its imposition of new constraints. Second, Mulji's travelogue suggests the complexity of ant…
How to Defame a God: Public Selfhood in the Maharaj Libel Case
This article argues that competing ideas about the nature of public selfhood structured the Maharaj Libel Case, as well as colonial publics more broadly. Jadunathji Maharaj had, in effect, lost his libel suit even before it went to court. For libel law, the essence of the human person is a private self that owns various forms of property, including the public persona known as ‘reputation’. For the Hindu Pushtimarg, meanwhile, the Maharaj was cons…
Aryas Unbound
This article analyzes a controversial book ban from the 1940s to trace the mutual determinations of print media, the legal regulation of communal sentiment, and the discourse of religious tolerance in late colonial India. Claimed as the Bible of the Arya Samaj, the Satyarth Prakash (The Light of Truth) was banned in the Muslim-majority province of Sindh because of its defamatory remarks about the Prophet Muhammad. The result was a controversy of …
Miracle Publics: Theosophy, Christianity, and the Coulomb Affair
Miracle Publics: Theosophy, Christianity, and the Coulomb Affair
How to Defame a God: Public Selfhood in the Maharaj Libel Case
This article argues that competing ideas about the nature of public selfhood structured the Maharaj Libel Case, as well as colonial publics more broadly. Jadunathji Maharaj had, in effect, lost his libel suit even before it went to court. For libel law, the essence of the human person is a private self that owns various forms of property, including the public persona known as ‘reputation’. For the Hindu Pushtimarg, meanwhile, the Maharaj was cons…
What is a Public? Notes from South Asia
In South Asia, as elsewhere, the category of ‘the public’ has come under increased scholarly and popular scrutiny in recent years. To better understand this current conjuncture, we need a fuller understanding of the specifically South Asian history of the term. Toward this end, our discussion begins by considering more than two decades of scholarship that have worked to excavate this history. We propose that two principal methods or approaches—th…
Aryas Unbound
This article analyzes a controversial book ban from the 1940s to trace the mutual determinations of print media, the legal regulation of communal sentiment, and the discourse of religious tolerance in late colonial India. Claimed as the Bible of the Arya Samaj, the Satyarth Prakash (The Light of Truth) was banned in the Muslim-majority province of Sindh because of its defamatory remarks about the Prophet Muhammad. The result was a controversy of …
Spiritual Despots: Modern Hinduism and the Genealogies of Self-Rule
Translated Liberties: Karsandas Mulji's Travels in England and the Anthropology of the Victorian Self
Through an analysis and historical contextualization of Gujarati writer Karsandas Mulji's Travels in England (1866), this article makes two interrelated arguments. First, Indian liberals' efforts to translate notions of liberty exposed the gap between liberalism's subtractive and additive projects, its abolition of customary constraints on the subject and its imposition of new constraints. Second, Mulji's travelogue suggests the complexity of ant…
Only Connect: Three Reflections on the Sociality of Secularism
The three reflections joined together in this essay develop a notion of “the sociality of secularism”—a phrase that gestures to how secularism structures the social field, becoming an intimate part of the practice of self for subjects who are always inextricably intertwined with others in a network of connectedness that is central to what it means to be worldly. The first reflection, by following the English word priestcraft to colonial India, de…
Enoch from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, vol. 1: Sources from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. By John C. Reeves and Annette Yoshiko Reed
Enoch from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, vol. 1: Sources from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. By John C. Reeves and Annette Yoshiko Reed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. vii + 403. $150
Insulting Religion: Penal Secularism and the Government of Feeling
This article revisits the Indian Penal Code’s restrictions on religious offense, especially Section 295A, with particular attention to nineteenth-century debates about secularizing the English common law of blasphemy. Building on scholarship that takes the histories of British and Indian secularisms as constitutively intertwined, I suggest that these entangled legal secularisms are best studied within a single analytic frame. I further suggest th…
Heterodoxies of the Body: Death, Secularism, and the Corpse of Raja Rammohun Roy
In 1833, Rammohun Roy, the so-called 'Father of Modern India,' died abruptly while traveling in England. Because cremation was then illegal in Britain, he was buried rather than immolated according to brahminical norms. This article situates the micro-history of his colonial corpse within the genealogy of secularism. I take secularism as a formation of the body in the most morbidly literal of ways-fused to embodied formations of race, caste, clas…
Hindutva and Violence: V. D. Savarkar and the Politics of History
Philosophy (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Political science (8 works) · History (7 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Sociology (6 works) · History (5 works) · Law (5 works) · Politics (5 works) · American Constitutional Law and Politics (4 works)