Suturing histories of caste and sexuality to histories of protest in India, this talk rearranges the grammar of our ethical engagements with the past and present. At stake here are the historical vernaculars -the data- that found the evidentiary regimes of rights and representation for minoritized subjects.

Anjali Arondekar is 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’s History (Duke University Press, 2023), grows out of her interest in the archival figurations of sexuality, caste and capital in British and Portuguese colonial India.

Website: https://anjaliarondekar.sites.ucsc.edu/