A powerful and incisive account of democracy's entanglement with violence in the postcolony, this book lays bare the limits of the liberal democratic project in the postcolonial context. A must-read for anyone rethinking postcolonialism's fraught relationship to Enlightenment legacies, it shows how democracy is often deployed as an alibi for violence by modern states, especially gendered violence carried out in its name. Centering women as both subjects of violation and as laboring, gendered agents of anti- and postcolonial struggle, the book makes a vital intervention in postcolonial feminist scholarship. Drawing on experiences from colonial and postcolonial Africa, it challenges readers to rethink both the promises and the failures of the democratizing process. Urgent, original, and deeply thought-provoking, it will reshape debates across disciplines.

Nikita Dhawan, Dresden University of Technology

Democracy's Subjections: Colonial Modernity and the Gendered Subject of Violence is a profound analysis of historical processes and historiographies rendering visible the enforced immiseration of peoples, from the vantage point of gendered labor, women and men, through and against empire's modernist bifurcated rule in the Third World – Africa, Asias and the Americas. Seesaw acts continue indirect rule while composing post/colonial impasses, fulcrums that differentiate inimical subjects, captive in relations and conditions of modern violence. Democracy's subjections make for multivalence in violability via differences instituted in between state and capital, with violated and violating in the margins, parsing oppression and exploitation, toward bringing out a possible democratic. This is a tour de force, a timely intervention.

Naifei Ding, National Central University, Taiwan

Lyn Ossome's Democracy's Subjections: Colonial Modernity and the Gendered Subject of Violence is brilliant. This text weaves history, theory, political struggles, desire and public and personal devastations that shapes the lives of Black/African women. Ossome focuses on South Africa yet offers an international lens for feminism to deeply comprehend the devastations of democracy. This book should be read globally, so that feminists can better comprehend, in the US and elsewhere, the contradictions and betrayals of democracy.

Joy James, Ebenezer Fitch Professor of the Humanities, Williams College, and author of Contextualizing Angela Davis