Affective Communities is an ambitious attempt to rethink the impact and legacy of the utopian socialism that had its heyday in Britain at the turn of the twentieth century. Famously reviled by Lenin as an “infantile disorder” and subject thereafter to the contemptuous dismissal of figures like George Orwell, the fin de siècle ensemble of vegetarians, Uranians, antivivisectionists, spiritualists, and aesthetes emerges in Leela Gandhi's account as bearers of a significant new political potential. Gandhi does not defend her subjects from Lenin's charge. Instead, she makes a forceful argument for embracing “immaturity” as a constitutive and salutary feature of their politics: a politics oriented toward relationality without organization, means without ends. In the lives and work of figures like Edward Carpenter, C. F. Andrews, M. K. Gandhi, Mirra Alfassa, and Manmohan Ghose—and in the relations among such individuals—can be glimpsed a utopian possibility subsequently occluded by the more familiar scripts of anticolonial politics. In attempting to uncover this lost horizon, Gandhi aims to add an important dimension to received accounts of anticolonialism, to people those accounts with hitherto disregarded actors, and to defamiliarize some of its durable figureheads.

Gandhi's study is part of a growing body of scholarship inquiring into affect and the affective. The burden of “affective community” here is to decenter a prevailing conception of community that is yoked to principles of telos, developmentalism, functionalism, and productivism, and thereby serves to reproduce and consolidate rationalized and exclusionary modes of sociality. In its place, Gandhi proffers a “noncommunitarian understanding of community” (20): an idealized vision of coming community most fully apprehended in Jacques Derrida's influential account of the politics of friendship. Friendship, Gandhi argues, is “the lost trope in anticolonial thought” (14). It names a form of affiliative solidarity that rubs against the grain of obligations to kin, party, or nation and thereby bears a dissident potential best captured in E. M. Forster's famous slogan “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country” (quoted on 10). Such betrayals, Gandhi asserts, are flights out of normative social relations that posit, in a genuinely revolutionary sense, alternative modes of sociality. Their role in animating the critique of imperialism has been consistently underestimated, necessitating her work of historical recovery and redress in Affective Communities.

Gandhi is a subtle, incisive critic of philosophy, and the strongest sections of the book are her lucid, authoritative treatments of Derrida, Foucault, Kant, Hegel, Nancy, and others. In contrast, Gandhi's treatment of her ostensible subjects is engaging but breezy—artfully narrated, thought provoking, and replete with fascinating anecdotal detail, but relatively slight in comparison with her far more absorbing and substantial philosophical “detours.” Gandhi poses questions that come to seem newly crucial—asking, for instance, why Edward Carpenter's homosexuality could only “speak its polemical name in and as a denunciation of western hegemony” (36). At such moments, it is easy to see what a generative study this is likely to be, and in particular how it will compel future scholars to connect sections of the historical archive that tend to be safely cordoned off from one another. Yet too often Gandhi's analysis seems to lose sight of its broader charge. For instance, while her sixth chapter offers a compelling defense of the anticolonial dimensions of late Victorian aestheticism and an important account of how Manmohan Ghose disseminated it in India, she seems in the process to relinquish her interest in the utopian potential of friendship and affective community. The collaborative aspects of the literary friendship between Ghose and Paul Binyon she describes ultimately seem to be subordinated to their common discipleship to Oscar Wilde. It is only in a chapter on M. K. Gandhi's encounter with British vegetarianism and zoophilia in the 1880s that Gandhi seems to find an adequate occasion for conveying the promise of the book's title. The Mahatma's youthful experiments have hitherto been recontained into a narrative of maturation that culminates in his ascendance to symbolic fatherhood of the Indian nation. While Leela Gandhi reads his sojourn in Britain in light of his subsequent achievements as politician and thinker, she also succeeds in analyzing the constitutive aspirations and possibilities of this early moment on their own terms. She conveys superbly the mutuality and reciprocity that characterized Gandhi's relations with fellow vegetarians in Britain. In the process, she identifies in these dealings a principle of other-directed sociality that eventuates in a far more fully realized vision of utopian community than is on evidence anywhere else in her study.

Gandhi's book amply demonstrates the significance of the figures it foregrounds, but its achievement is compromised by an ill-judged polemical framing. In evidence throughout is an all but programmatic commitment to discrediting the utopians’ rivals on the left, which too often takes the form of hasty and uninformed dismissals of formations like the Independent Labour Party or figures like Robert Blatchford. As the work of Raphael Samuel demonstrates, taking stock of the often unlovely legacies of the Old Left demands the same kind of agile, attentive historical intelligence that Gandhi bestows upon her primary subjects but withholds from these antagonists. Gandhi maintains a somewhat more tenable polemic against what she construes as a sociological strain in postcolonial studies, though the argument would be more persuasive if she did not present it as a broad-gauge critique of “the anti-literary fallacy within postcolonial orthodoxy” (157). Such a claim to heterodoxy is a routine gesture in postcolonial studies and, in this instance, does not convince. Gandhi adduces a slim body of evidence, and the only work she engages with in any detail is Gauri Viswanathan's Masks of Conquest (New York, 1989)—certainly an influential and generative study upon its appearance close to two decades ago, but hard to credit as typifying a heterogeneous and fast-moving field. Gandhi is also far from self-critical of her own alignment with contemporary forms of intellectual common sense—she is, for instance, remarkably credulous of the claims of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri regarding the withering away of civil society and modern regimes of citizenship. Her attempts to associate her subjects with recent critics of neoliberalism like Naomi Klein often seem strained and overlook the ways in which Klein and others are elaborating decentralized and mobile organizational forms rather than eschewing the problematic of organization altogether. Perhaps it's not too much to hope that they will have a more enduring impact than the subjects of Gandhi's fascinating study.