This book investigates the multiple ways in which states of emergency and the exercise of colonial sovereignty have been mediated in literary and cultural texts, and examines the contribution that literary and cultural texts have made to our understanding of the legal, ethical and political significance of states of emergency from the late nineteenth century to the present. More specifically, the book considers how the historical and rhetorical formations of colonial sovereignty, states of emergency and the use of force help to elucidate contemporary formations of counter-terrorism, such as th ... More

This book investigates the multiple ways in which states of emergency and the exercise of colonial sovereignty have been mediated in literary and cultural texts, and examines the contribution that literary and cultural texts have made to our understanding of the legal, ethical and political significance of states of emergency from the late nineteenth century to the present. More specifically, the book considers how the historical and rhetorical formations of colonial sovereignty, states of emergency and the use of force help to elucidate contemporary formations of counter-terrorism, such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Through a series of case studies, each chapter focuses on a particular body of texts, laws and archival documents, including debates about the use of emergency legislation, indefinite detention without trial, torture and summary execution in European colonial societies as well as the narrative structures, metaphors, and imagery of terror, violence and barbarism in literary and cultural texts from the high period of European colonialism in the early twentieth century to the contemporary postcolonial era. In so doing, the book claims that the state of emergency operated as a travelling concept that was part of a global imperial network of counter-insurgency, negotiated between the metropolitan legal institutions of European empires and their colonial governments, military and police forces, and re-iterated in different colonial spaces..