MixedThe New YorkerLegacy of Violence, like Elkins’s earlier book, shuttles between horrific details and historical and thematic contexts. And it, too, relies occasionally on questionable statistics ... Yet some of what she recounts is devastating, including the story of how British dark arts were distilled in interwar Palestine, propelling the grisliness of liberal imperialism to another level ... Elkins’s account...is convinced of liberal imperialism’s ability to absorb and neutralize criticism ... When her theory corners her into an account of the final unravelling of empire couched largely in terms of high-policy calculations about when to forgo power and instead pursue influence, it’s as if the ghosts of imperial history that she set out to vanquish had returned to inhabit her book ... her quest for a unifying theory sends her gliding over significant distinctions in the governance of wildly different colonial territories ... I was surprised to see such a shrewd scholar repeatedly minimize the impact of anti-colonial thinkers and actors ... she has added important dimension to our still partial understanding of the British Empire’s sadism and hypocrisy ... Yet oversimplified theories are themselves prone to bury other histories.
Isabel Wilkerson
MixedThe New YorkerWriting with calm and penetrating authority, Wilkerson discusses three caste hierarchies in world history—those of India, America, and Nazi Germany—and excavates the shared principles \'burrowed deep within the culture and subconsciousness\' of each ... Even on her home terrain, where she focusses on what she calls the \'poles of the American caste system,\' Blacks and whites, her analysis sometimes seems more ahistorical than transhistorical, as temporal specificities collapse into an eternal present. But this effect is consonant with the view of history she presents in her book—one involving more grim continuity than hopeful departures, more regression to the mean than moments of progress ... In Wilkerson’s book, one senses that each word choice has been carefully weighed, and her tone remains measured even when describing her own assault ... Mustering old and new historical scholarship, sometimes to shattering effect, Caste brings out how systematically, through the centuries, Black lives were destroyed \'under the terror of people who had absolute power over their bodies and their very breath\' ... As for how caste dynamics affect those Black Americans who really do pick up the laundry—or shell the shrimp, or clean the motel rooms—Wilkerson has little to say. At one point, she implies that poor people of color are in some ways more fortunate than wealthier ones, because they have fewer stress-related health problems. She surmises that this has to do with low-income people of color getting less white pushback. But the claim isn’t supported by most recent research, and she doesn’t mention the significant diagnostic gap created by unequal access to health care. Considerations of material resources, in her analysis, can disappear in the shadow of status ... Applying a single abstraction to multiple realities inevitably creates friction—sometimes productive, sometimes not ... Even in this country, as Wilkerson prosecutes the case for her caste model, she occasionally skirts facts that resist alignment with her thesis ... Wilkerson seems at times to have a sophisticated idea of how caste operates in the modern world, with all its internal diversities. But at this and other points in her book she appears to be reaching back toward older understandings of the system, in which each group is a monolith, consistent in its interests and political allegiances, impervious to contingencies or context...This resort to moral psychology—a self-oriented Gandhian move of the kind that infuriated Ambedkar—seems a retreat from her larger argument that white supremacy should be seen as systemic, not personal. Perhaps, boxed in by her caste model, she is seeking hope by reaching outside it. But, if the caste model can feel unnuanced and overly deterministic, the turn toward empathy can feel detached from history in another way...Talk of \'structural racism\' is meant to highlight this difficult truth; Wilkerson’s understanding of caste, by emphasizing norms of respect over the promptings of distributive justice, can sometimes obscure it.
Ramachandra Guha
RaveThe Financial Times... exhaustive, deeply affecting ... As I put down the book, I was struck that Guha had let us know enough to achieve what the best biographers aim for: a rendering of the subject in such fullness that the reader feels himself wrestling directly with the protagonist, his time, and his ideas ... the narrative itself brings into vivid focus the vast array of characters underwriting that heroic, solitary posed ... Guha’s astute contextualizing draws on a wider range of materials than any of Gandhi’s many previous biographers, thanks to his scouring of dozens of archives across several continents. And while it seems odd to say of a more than 1,000-page book that it has a terseness about it, Guha achieves a taut, unornamented prose that rings true to his subject ... Guha’s biography flatters no school of thought, staying truer than any previous biography to the stature and weaknesses of a man whose voice should still arrest us today.
