Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind. By Osagie K. Obasogie. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013. 288 pp. $24.95, paper.

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12143
• Published date: 01 June 2015
• Date: 01 June 2015

social terrain of caste and communal violence. Baxi focuses on the

largely neglected history and use of the Scheduled Caste and Sched-

uled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act of 1989, which names the

rape of Dalit (formerly “Untouchables”) and tribal women as an

atrocity. Baxi innovatively shows how rape trials produce a language

that obscures and naturalizes the structural violence of caste and the

everyday humiliation Dalit women face as a result of sexual violence.

Finally, Public Secrets of Law takes on the question of the significance

of sexual violence in the making of communal religious violence, a

question that continues to define the experience of sexual violence

in Gujarat and across India. Temporality is key to the legal making

of the event of sexual violence, where legal recognition of communal

rape and sectarian sexual violence are seen as temporary anomalies,

exceptions to the norm, rather than everyday structures that define

women’s lives in contemporary India.

From these examples, one gets a sense of the diverse areas of

inquiry featured in Baxi’s investigation of rape trials—from biases

that travel under the guise of science, to the legal obfuscation of

structural violence, to courtroom scripts that dictate how women

and children are constituted as legal subjects. Beyond questions of

sexual violence and the law, Baxi’s ethnography explores the

understudied nature of the workings of Indian courts. Indeed, the

study offers so much rich material that it could easily be two sepa-

rate monographs, opening up more questions than it can answer.

Public Secrets of Law will be of value to scholars interested in the

growing field of South Asian legal studies, comparative ethnogra-

phies of trial courts, the study of women and children as legal sub-

jects, and scholarship on law and sexual violence. Baxi provides

remarkable insight into the everyday working of misogynistic legal

imaginations of women in the courtroom and the naturalization of

patriarchy in the legal adjudication of sexual violence. More

broadly, PublicSecretsofLawoffers unique and important perspec-

tives on the working and failure of criminal law in India.

***

Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind.By

Osagie K. Obasogie. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,

2013. 288 pp. $24.95, paper.

Reviewed by Ren

ee Ann Cramer, Law, Politics and Society, Drake

University

Book Reviews 537