by Disha Karnad Jani
In this latest episode of In Theory, Disha Karnad Jani interviews Stephen Legg about his new book, Spaces of Anticolonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities (University of Georgia Press, 2025). In the book, Legg provides a study of Indian anti-colonialism in the decades before Independence that foregrounds the spatially-mediated and bottom-up politics of old and New Delhi’s poor, its middle classes, and the prominent anti-colonial figures of the Indian National Congress, including especially the women of the anti-colonial movement. He centers the concept of parrhesia (from the later lectures of Michel Foucault) to arrive at an account of the governmentality of anti-colonialism in the years between mass civil disobedience and the Quit India Movement.
Stephen Legg is Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Nottingham, and the author and editor of several books, including Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities (Wiley, 2007) and Round Table Conference Geographies: Constituting Colonial India in Interwar London (Cambridge University Press, 2023).
Disha Karnad Jani is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Research Training Group (RTG) “World Politics” at Universität Bielefeld. Her current book project is an intellectual history of the League Against Imperialism, 1927-1937. She is the co-host of In Theory, the podcast of the JHI Blog.
Featured image: Cover of Spaces of Anti-Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities, courtesy of University of Georgia Press.
