Affective communities: anticolonial though and the politics of friendship

If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country' So E. M. Forster famously observed in Two Cheers for Democracy. This epigrammatic manifesto, where 'friend' stands as a metaphor for cross-cultural collaboration, holds the key, Leela Gandhi argues, to the hitherto neglected history of Western anti imperialism.
Focusing on individuals and groups who renounced the privileges of imperialism to elect affinity with the victims of expansionism, she uncovers the utopian socialist critiques of empire that emerged in Europe, specifically in Britain, at the end of the nineteenth century. Leela Gandhi reveals for the first time how those associated with marginalized lifestyles, subcultures, and traditions including homosexuality, vegetarianism, animals rights, spiritualism, and aestheticism-united against imperialism and forged strong bonds with colonized subjects and cultures.