A History I am Not Writing: Sexuality, Exemplarity, South Asia

The incitement of the talk's title, “A History I Am Not Writing,” summons a paradoxical labor for histories of sexuality in South Asia: to read the archival exemplar precisely for what it cannot hold. There is no stabilizing recuperation of historical detail on offer here, but more an exhortation to think the exemplar of sexuality as an absorbing and abundant discursive presence, reassembled through our every act of reading. Bypassing the seductive heroics of recuperative historiography, this talk proffers a different pathway to historical presence.

Part of the 2021 CSA Graduate Student Workshop.

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Anjali Arondekar is Associate Professor of Feminist Studies, and founding Co-Director, Center for South Asian Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research engages the poetics and politics of sexuality, caste, and historiography, with a focus on Indian Ocean Studies and South Asia. She is the author of For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Duke University Press, 2009, Orient Blackswan, India, 2010), winner of the Alan Bray Memorial Book Award for best book in lesbian, gay, or queer studies in literature and cultural studies, Modern Language Association (MLA), 2010. She is co-editor (with Geeta Patel) of “Area Impossible: The Geopolitics of Queer Studies,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (2016). Her second book, Abundance: Sexuality, Historiography, Geopolitics (forthcoming Duke University Press), grows out of her interest in the figurations of sexuality, caste and capital in colonial British and Portuguese India.

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If you need a disability-related accommodation, please contact southasiainfo [at] stanford.edu (southasiainfo[at]stanford[dot]edu). Requests should be made by April 30th.