After Empire, Paul Gilroy reflects upon the harrowing effect that colonial violence may have had on the colonized, pointing out that while ‘the practice of blasting prisoners to death by tying their bodies over the mouths of cannon’ was meant to terrorize and subjugate Indians, it also had a dehumanizing effect on the British: ‘The vastly more interesting issue of what this grisly spectacle might have meant and done to its British organizers, spectators, and enthusiasts gets smuggled out of sight,’ as does the experience of ‘onlookers who were covered by blood and fragments of flesh … to say
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